Inc. Echo Spot, from left, Echo, Echo Plus, and Fire TV devices sit on display during the company's product reveal launch event in downtown Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2017. Amazon unveiled a smaller, cheaper version of its popular Alexa-powered Echo speaker that the e-commerce giant said has better sound. Lennar, the nation's largest homebuilder, is now building model homes with Alexa-integrated technologies such as smart doorbells, locks, thermostats, lights and integrated Wifi. Amazon and Lennar announced the partnership in May to launch "Amazon Experience Centers" around the country. In these smart homes, customers would be able to ask Alexa to do anything from turning down the lights and starting a party music playlist to turning on the doorbell video feed when someone rings.

Editor's note: This post is the result of a collaboration with PredictX, a decision automation platform. Author Joni Lindes is a content writer at PredictX. AI is set to disrupt our current society on a major scale. According to Indeed, the number of roles in AI has risen by 485% in the UK since 2014, but the digital skills gap continues to hold back innovation. In 2017, companies spent around $22 billion on AI-related mergers and acquisitions -- 26 times more than 2015.

Say hello to CIMON, the world's first interactive A.I. system to be launched into space to assist the crew aboard the International Space Station. This robot is very smart, sort of like if Amazon's Alexa had gotten a Ph.D. in rocket science, but it can also tell jokes. Short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, this robot was brought into existence by melding Airbus' hardware with the software behind IBM's Watson supercomputer. "[CIMON is] the smartest lab partner in the world," Bret Greenstein -- IBM's Global Vice President of Watson Internet of Things Offerings -- tells Inverse. "[It] lets you take all the credit, is there for you when you need them."

I was recently invited to speak at the TiECON Florida conference in Tampa Bay. I came back amazed and fascinated by the entrepreneurial activity and enthusiasm of the community in Southern Florida. Unbeknownst to me, University of South Florida (USF) is amongst the nation's Top 30 for research expenditures among public universities, according to the National Science Foundation. It has a vast amount of intellectual capital, ranking 19th out of 200 U.S. universities in research commercialization with 125 patents granted for 2017. It is also the home of USF Connect, a technology incubator that unite technology and talent with businesses.

Fashion preference is a fuzzy concept that depends on customer taste, prevailing norms in fashion product/style, henceforth used interchangeably, and a customer's perception of utility or fashionability, yet fashion e-retail relies on algorithmically generated search and recommendation systems that process structured data and images to best match customer preference. Retailers study tastes solely as a function of what sold vs what did not, and take it to represent customer preference. Such explicit modeling, however, belies the underlying user preference, which is a complicated interplay of preference and commercials such as brand, price point, promotions, other sale events, and competitor push/marketing. It is hard to infer a notion of utility or even customer preference by looking at sales data. In search and recommendation systems for fashion e-retail, customer preference is implicitly derived by user-user similarity or item-item similarity. In this work, we aim to derive a metric that separates the buying preferences of users from the commercials of the merchandise (price, promotions, etc). We extend our earlier work on explicit signals to gauge sellability or preference [5] with implicit signals from user behaviour.

Dating apps run the gamut. From platforms geared toward religious affiliations to social class delineations to ones for Disney aficionados (yes, that exists), there seems to be something for everyone nowadays. In regards to gay men, in particular, the app market is riddled with options centered on appearance: i.e. scruffy, muscular, twink or bearish. Very little emphasis is actually grounded in emotional connections--a pervasive characteristic that Chappy, a new app created by the parent company of Bumble, is trying to circumvent. Founded in 2017, Chappy aims to be a judgment-free space.

In January, a security firm discovered that photos exchanged on Tinder weren't encrypted. If the firm connected to the same network as someone using the dating app, pics could be intercepted on their way between the app and the service's servers. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to the company shortly thereafter expressing concern over the vulnerability, but today Tinder wrote back assuring him that all photos are now encrypted, allowing you to upload your lovely or lascivious images securely. So, um, this is pretty weird. Apparently Senator Wyden just got Tinder to properly encrypt your swipe data, so you can all get it on in private.

Have you got an Amazon Fire Tablet gathering dust in a drawer somewhere? Then why not turn it into a full-fledged Amazon Echo digital assistant device? That's now a possibility thanks to Amazon's new Show Mode, which essentially turns your tab into a dedicated Echo-display device, much like the Echo Show and Spot models, making Alexa a lot more portable in your ever-expanding smart home. Compatible with both the Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 10 tablets, Show Mode brings Alexa to the forefront of the Fire Tablet. As with the Show and Spot, when you ask Alexa something, the digital assistant's answers will be backed up by visuals – think weekly weather icons, music album covers, song lyrics, that sort of thing.

Board games aren't quite as sexy as their digital counterparts, but the hobby has nevertheless seen a resurgence in recent years. NPD Group reported that board game sales in the U.S. grew by 28 percent in 2016, cafes dedicated to the hobby are cropping up all over the country (and the world), and three out of the top ten most-funded projects on Kickstarter are tabletop games. Much of this can be attributed not just to the increased desire for real-life social interaction, but the rise of good-quality titles that are far superior to outdated classics like Monopoly and Candyland. But there is one problem with all of these new and exciting games: You need to learn how to play them. Unlike video games, which you can figure out by jumping into a tutorial and pressing a few buttons, tabletop versions often require you to read the instructions.

The newly released Sonos product is a soundbar – that long, narrow speaker that sits under your TV pumping out bullet ricochet sound effects and atmospheric rumblings thanks to cunningly placed tweeters and woofers that create a soundstage wider than the speaker itself. The Sonos Beam, as it's called, is more compact than most soundbars, including the company's previous TV helpers – the Playbar and Playbase – so that bigger soundstage is especially important here. At the product's launch, I sat down with CEO Patrick Spence. Spence is the former chief operating officer who moved to the big job in January 2017. He is charismatic and welcoming, with the utterly unflappable, chilled vibe of someone who has music in the background all day long.