From USD 2.3 trillion in 2017, the worth of eCommerce transactions is estimated to reach USD 4.88 trillion in 2021. But the meager contribution of eCommerce in the total retail sales (In the same period, from 10.2% to 17.5%) explains a huge gap which, in fact, is an opportunity to tap into. Wisitech explores its critical usability in our regular business. How Familiar are We to AI or Artificial Intelligence? You might have noticed your kid making use of Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana or Amazon Alexa to seek answers from Google, control devices, and apps, or place an order on Amazon.

Latent factor models for recommender systems represent users and items as low dimensional vectors. Privacy risks have been previously studied mostly in the context of recovery of personal information in the form of usage records from the training data. However, the user representations themselves may be used together with external data to recover private user information such as gender and age. In this paper we show that user vectors calculated by a common recommender system can be exploited in this way. We propose the privacy-adversarial framework to eliminate such leakage, and study the trade-off between recommender performance and leakage both theoretically and empirically using a benchmark dataset. We briefly discuss further applications of this method towards the generation of deeper and more insightful recommendations.

Siri, Alexa and Cortana all started out as female. Now a group of marketing executives, tech experts and academics are trying to make virtual assistants more egalitarian. Siri, Alexa and Cortana all started out as female. Now a group of marketing executives, tech experts and academics are trying to make virtual assistants more egalitarian. Have you ever noticed something most virtual assistants have in common?

Top Republican lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters Monday asking Apple and Google for more information on how extensively their smartphones track people's locations and record snippets of their conversations. The questions from lawmakers come amid a broader scrutiny from Capitol Hill into how the underlying, everyday practices of technology companies may infringe on Americans' privacy. Congressional hearings with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed several lawmakers were troubled by the amount of data that the social network collects on a regular basis. In the letters to Google and Apple, lawmakers said the committee is "reviewing the business practices that may impact the privacy expectations of Americans." The letters ask Larry Page -- the chief executive of Google's parent company Alphabet -- and Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, for more specific information on how their phones collect location information at times when many people may not expect.

Top Republican lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters Monday asking Apple and Google for more information on how extensively their smartphones track people's locations and record snippets of their conversations. The questions from lawmakers come amid a broader scrutiny from Capitol Hill into how the underlying, everyday practices of technology companies may infringe on Americans' privacy. Congressional hearings with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed several lawmakers were troubled by the amount of data that the social network collects on a regular basis. In the letters to Google and Apple, lawmakers said the committee is "reviewing the business practices that may impact the privacy expectations of Americans." The letters ask Larry Page -- the chief executive of Google's parent company Alphabet -- and Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, for more specific information on how their phones collect location information at times when many people may not expect.

The explosive growth of in-home artificial intelligence assistants has many companies scrambling to develop apps and "skills" to keep up with the new technology. But many are doing so without a clear strategy. The same thing could be said about chatbots, virtual reality and even social media. Why are companies in such a rush to be first to market with new technology, even with a potentially inferior product? According to the Smart Audio Report from NPR and Edison Research, one in six Americans now has a smart speaker.

Last week we told you about a killer deal on the original Pixel (which is still going on), but if you'd rather get some of Google's newest products for less, now's the time to act. Pixels, Chromecasts, and Google Home speakers are all on steep sales through July 17. The Pixel 2 XL, Google's premier smartphone, is $100 off both the 64GB and 128GB models, bringing them down to $749 and $849 respectively. The phone easily earned our Editors' Choice award for its great all-around performance, but the Pixel 2 XL's blending of a top-of-the-line mobile camera with Google's A.I. magic results in one of the most fun, elegant camera experiences you'll find in a camera today. And if you want to use the phone's power to wander worlds in virtual reality, the 2nd-gen Daydream View headset is on sale for $49, 50 percent off its $99 list price. The Google Home Max is a beefy smart speaker.

Dish launched Alexa support for its Hopper and Wally set-top boxes last year, so the devices can already do your bidding with just a spoken command. Now, the satellite TV provider is giving you another voice control option: one that should make you happy if you prefer Google's AI to Amazon's. So long as you have an Android device, an iPhone loaded with the AI's app or an Assistant device such as a Home speaker or a Home mini, you can navigate its channels and shows with your voice. You can ask Assistant to play, pause, fast-forward, rewind and adjust the volume of what you're watching. If you have no idea what to watch, you can also search for shows based on channel, title, actor and genre.

Amazon Prime Day is just around the corner and it could be bigger and better than ever. Amazon Prime Day features a lot of deals. Not all are worth pursuing. Like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Amazon's annual Prime Day features tons of products screaming "deal!" But sometimes it's tough to separate the big discounts from the disappointments. Here's how to make sense of the sales bonanza that starts July 16.

Customer experience is a combination of the perceptions, emotions, and reactions that a consumer has while using different channels to interact with a company's environment, products, or employees. Major brands aspire to deliver an engaging and compelling experience across all the touch points and "moments of now" they have with their individual customers. To deliver on their ambition, they build the ability to consistently support the entire customer experience lifecycle: from initial contact, through the process of acquisition, engagement, and into a long-term relationship – anywhere, anytime, any device, seamless, contextualized, personalized, and proactive. Many of them have already started the transformation towards having a single, consistent customer platform that supports the end-to-end customer experience by interconnecting enterprise-wide sets of customer data and insights, customer engagement engines (such as marketing, CRM, commerce), and enabling processes through a digital architecture. This next-generation digital platform not only connects the whole client ecosystem of business and technology partners, but also the ecosystem of internet platforms, social networks and devices favored by the consumer.