At its F8 developer conference, Facebook announced Facebook Dating, an in-app feature that will spice up the social media platform with some romance, meaningful romance--or so Facebook hopes. The feature bears striking similarity to the dating app Hinge, which allows users to scroll through detailed profiles and start conversations not by merely saying hello but by commenting on a specific profile item. For example, you can click on a picture of a crush's trip to Morocco and mention that you've been there, too. You can also simply "like" an image, video, or question response to signify your interest. So far, Hinge's creators have played off the similarities as a compliment, and there's not much else they can do about it anyway.

We consider a particular instance of a common problem in recommender systems: using a database of book reviews to inform user-targeted recommendations. In our dataset, books are categorized into genres and sub-genres. To exploit this nested taxonomy, we use a hierarchical model that enables information pooling across across similar items at many levels within the genre hierarchy. The main challenge in deploying this model is computational: the data sizes are large, and fitting the model at scale using off-the-shelf maximum likelihood procedures is prohibitive. To get around this computational bottleneck, we extend a moment-based fitting procedure proposed for fitting single-level hierarchical models to the general case of arbitrarily deep hierarchies. This extension is an order of magnetite faster than standard maximum likelihood procedures. The fitting method can be deployed beyond recommender systems to general contexts with deeply-nested hierarchical generalized linear mixed models.

Microsoft has just earned the title of the third most valuable company in the world. The software giant saw its market cap skyrocket to just over $760 billion on Wednesday, making it that much closer to being the world's most valuable company -- a title held by Apple and closely followed by Amazon. But that doesn't mean Microsoft has lost out on any bragging rights, however, as its new market capitalization means that it has surged ahead of Google parent company Alphabet, in terms of valuation. Microsoft is now worth close to $20 billion more than Alphabet, which has a market cap of roughly $744 billion. It's the first time that such occurrence has happened in three years Microsoft is now worth close to $20 billion more than Alphabet, which has a market cap of roughly $744 billion.

For better or worse, Google Assistant can do it all. From mundane tasks like turning on your lights and setting reminders to convincingly mimicking human speech patterns, the AI helper is so capable it's scary. Its latest (unofficial) ability, though, is a bit more sinister. Artist Alexander Reben recently taught Assistant to fire a gun. Fortunately, the victim was an apple, not a living being.

Moscow-based search giant Yandex has revealed a Russian speaking smart speaker to take on Amazon. The $160 device will work with its digital assistant'Alice', becoming the latest challenger to take on the leading voice-activated home helpers from Silicon Valley. Yandex is targeting the Russian-speaking market with its Yandex.Station speaker, as well as a platform on which third-party developers can programme Alice to order pizza, check mobile phone bills or buy plane tickets. The $160 device will work with its digital assistant'Alice', becoming the latest challenger to take on the leading voice-activated home helpers from Silicon Valley. The Yandex Station has Bluetooth capabilities and an HDMI port for streaming television on connected displays, and has including two 10W audio drivers and a 30W woofer.

A new 40,000-person study of smart speakers and their connection to retail purchases shows that Amazon Echo buyers increase their spending at Amazon significantly after purchasing a smart speaker. "We surveyed over 40,000 Amazon customers," says Adam Marchick, CEO of Alpine.AI, which help companies build integrations with Amazon Echo and Google Home. "For people who have Echos, in the past 12 months they've significantly increased spending on pet food and treats, baking and cooking, grooming, and health and beauty products." Not only have people increased spending at Amazon, Marchick says, they've actually decreased spending elsewhere. "[Echo] is causing people to get more reliant on Amazon," he told me last week.

With its paid Premium streaming service, YouTube has a steep climb to even compete against entrenched services like Netflix. First it has to get our attention, so for one of its most-anticipated series, Impulse, it came up with an interesting promotion. Google Assistant owners can access the first episode by saying "talk to Impulse." The AI device will give a brief sum-up of the show and ask for a password (it's "Henry" and a few variants). Once you do that, you'll get a link to the first unlisted episode on YouTube.

Microsoft is acquiring conversational AI startup Semantic Machines in an effort to make bots and intelligent assistants like Cortana sound and respond more like humans. Founded in 2014, Semantic Machines uses machine learning to make bots respond in a more natural way to queries. Semantic Machines is led by UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein and former Apple chief speech scientist Larry Gillick. Both are considered pioneers in conversational AI. Microsoft's acquisition will boost the company's Cortana digital assistant, as well as the company's Azure Bot Service that's used by 300,000 developers.

Since losing his vision at age 13, Erik Weihenmayer has summited Mount Everest, white-water rafted and climbed frozen waterfalls. But making soup in his kitchen presented a unique challenge. On a frozen waterfall he could tap his ax against the ice to get a feel for its density, but in the kitchen, he had no way to differentiate between cans of tomato and chicken noodle. Mr. Weihenmayer, 49 years old, found a solution in Microsoft Corp.'s Seeing AI, a free app for the visually impaired. Among other things, the app can recognize faces, identify money, read handwriting and scan bar codes to differentiate between cans of soup.

LONDON, UK – Conversational AI allows you to reignite the customer experience with increased engagement, personalised customer service and improved customer satisfaction. Your customers can simply ask for what they want as if they were talking to a live assistant--and receive the right response, every time. Providing 24/7 customer support simply on your own terms is no longer enough. Your customers want an experience that's fast and convenient. They want to message you a question while waiting in line for coffee or use their voice to make an online purchase while driving to work. They want to be understood using their own words, not your jargon.