Artificial intelligence is the yin and blockchains are the yang of digital business. Artificial intelligence is the yin and blockchains are the yang of digital business. While AI helps us assess, understand, recognize and decide, blockchains can help us verify, execute and record. While the machine learning methods that are a part of AI help us find opportunity and improve decision making, smart contracts and blockchains can automate verification of the transactional parts of the process. AI and blockchains in that sense are complementary and synergistic.

Artificial intelligence is the yin and blockchains are the yang of digital business. Artificial intelligence is the yin and blockchains are the yang of digital business. While AI helps us assess, understand, recognize and decide, blockchains can help us verify, execute and record. While the machine learning methods that are a part of AI help us find opportunity and improve decision making, smart contracts and blockchains can automate verification of the transactional parts of the process. AI and blockchains in that sense are complementary and synergistic.

Amazon released its first Echo device for kids last month, but now lawmakers are raising privacy concerns due to a feature that records children's voices and stores them online. Called the Echo Dot Kids Edition, it looks just like Amazon's other Alexa-enabled devices, but includes new parental controls, child-friendly content and a range of colorful protective cases. Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat, and Congressman Joe Barton, a Republican, questioned the giant corporation over the privacy issues. Lawmakers have raised privacy concerns over the Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition because it records children's voices and stores them online. In a response, Amazon said parents can permanently erase the recordings whenever they choose.

The AI Weekly usually dives deep into a single subject, but with Microsoft and Google hosting their annual developer conferences, this is no ordinary week. Each conference -- here's everything from Microsoft's Build and everything from Google's I/O -- resulted in dozens of headlines, making it tough to interpret what really matters. Well, here's a handful of important developments to follow from both events at the heart of the AI world. FPGA and TPU Perhaps the most important advances in computing power for training AI systems announced this week were the beta release of Microsoft's Project Brainwave, which uses field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, and Google's plans to release a third generation of tensor processing unit (TPU) chips. Two new AI services worth following Also announced this week: The ML Kit SDK for fast application of AI for Android and iOS developers is now available, and edge deployment of Microsoft Cognitive Services is coming later this year.

Among the more modern anxieties of parents today is how virtual assistants will train their children to act. The fear is that kids who habitually order Amazon's Alexa to read them a story or command Google's Assistant to tell them a joke are learning to communicate not as polite, considerate citizens, but as demanding little twerps. This worry has become so widespread that Amazon and Google both announced this week that their voice assistants can now encourage kids to punctuate their requests with "please." The version of Alexa that inhabits the new Echo Dot Kids Edition will thank children for "asking so nicely." Google Assistant's forthcoming Pretty Please feature will remind kids to "say the magic word" before complying with their wishes.

Tuesday morning, many people on my Facebook feed shared this this video of Google's new AI assistant. The article accompanying the video called it "jaw-dropping." It was shared thousands of times, with many calling it "amazing." In the video, recorded at Google's I/O developers conference, CEO Sundar Pichai played a recording of a Google Assistant calling to make a haircut appointment. The audience seemed enthralled, oohing and aahing at all the appropriate moments. The announcement isn't a surprise; we knew AI would dominate the conference.

At Google's I/O developer conference this week there was a lot of news to unpack, but the story that seems to have captured people's imagination -- or fueled their nightmares -- is Duplex, the AI that enables Google Assistant to make phone calls for you. In the demo, Google Assistant goes back and forth in conversation with a person for about a minute to make a haircut reservation. In another demonstration, Google Assistant made a reservation at a restaurant. Duplex is still an experiment, CEO Sundar Pichai explained onstage Tuesday, an experiment that will continue with user testing this summer. Despite taking up less than two minutes in more than two hours of product rollouts and upgrades, its debut may mark a noteworthy moment in the history of conversational AI, and perhaps the history of communication, as one of the first publicly known instances of a bot proactively working on a human's behalf in the world.

Xiaomi has had a hard time gaining traction with US customers. To help sidestep that, the Chinese company is prepping the runway for (hopeful) domestic success by adding Google Assistant tech to its smart home devices, 9to5Google spotted. Meaning that once the company's Mi line of bedside lamps, LED lightbulbs and Smart plug arrive on these shores you'll be able to control them with your voice. The lamp and bulb each are capable of 16 million color customizations, according to the company, and they'll be available "shortly." We have to wait and see.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. While we don't have any formal research to back this up, we're pretty confident that if you ask anyone with an Amazon Echo smart speaker where they keep it, most will tell you theirs is in the kitchen. After all, it's a central location in the home that gets a lot of traffic--not to mention that Alexa can be quite helpful when you're cooking! You probably already know that Alexa can help with converting measurements, setting timers, and even displaying recipes if you have an Echo Show or Echo Spot.

A group of children's advocates and two lawmakers are raising questions about Amazon.com's The advocates led by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood said Friday that the presence of a voice-activated speaker on children's nightstands is an unwelcome development that could prove intrusive or potentially disruptive to their development. "AI devices raise a host of privacy concerns and interfere with the face-to-face interactions and self-driven play that children need to thrive," CCFC's Executive Director Josh Golin said in a statement. While the group is not suggesting Amazon's new product violates privacy law -- an accusation it has leveled at other tech giants such as Google -- its campaign wades into the murkier debate of how parents should evaluate their children's interaction with speakers. Research into that effect is still inconclusive.