You might just be looking at some of the Alexa-powered devices due to show at Amazon's rumored hardware event this month. Pocket-lint has spotted listings (since pulled) for the Echo Sub wireless subwoofer (above) and Smart Plug (below), both of which see Amazon venturing into unfamiliar territory. The Sub adds 100W of bass to an Echo or Echo Plus setup, whether it's one speaker or two -- yes, stereo pairing would also be new. It reportedly cost £75 (about $99) when it shipped on October 11th, which might be a small price to pay if your rap or trance isn't sufficiently room-shaking. The Smart Plug, meanwhile, is fairly self-explanatory: it's a wall wart that brings basic Alexa voice control to any device, no smart home hub required.

Amazon is giving users a new way to shop. The tech giant has launched'Scout,' a new unit of its sprawling e-commerce site, that uses machine learning to serve up personalized product recommendations. Users simply click the thumbs up or thumbs down button and Amazon will respond by showing other products based on their choices. Amazon has launched'Scout,' a new unit of its sprawling e-commerce site, that uses machine learning to serve up personalized product recommendations based on users' interests The firm hasn't yet promoted the site, but it's being tested on the Amazon site and in the app, according to CNBC, which first spotted the move. For now, Scout is limited to offering recommendations for home furniture, kitchen and dining products, women's shoes, patio furniture, lighting and bedding.

Eighteen teams were selected for the inaugural competition last year. To build their socialbots, the students combined state-of-the-art techniques with their own novel strategies in the areas of natural language understanding and conversational AI. This article reports on the research conducted over the 2017-2018 year. While the 20-minute grand challenge was not achieved in the first year, the competition produced several conversational agents that advanced the state of the art, that are interesting for everyday users to interact with, and that help form a baseline for the second year of the competition. We conclude with a summary of the human conversation have applicability in both work that we plan to address in the second year of professional and everyday domains. The first generation of such assistants -- Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google The Alexa Prize competition received hundreds of Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana -- have been applications from interested universities. After a focused on short, task-oriented interactions, such as detailed review of the applications, Amazon playing music or answering simple questions, as announced 12 sponsored and 6 unsponsored teams opposed to the longer free-form conversations that as the inaugural cohort for the Alexa Prize. The teams occur naturally in social and professional human that went live for the 2017 competition, listed alphabetically interaction. Conversational AI is the study of techniques by university, were DeisBot (Brandeis University), for creating software agents that can engage Magnus (Carnegie Mellon University), in natural conversational interactions with humans.

Quizlet is the most popular online learning tool in the United States, and is used by over 2/3 of high school students, and 1/2 of college students. With more than 95% of Quizlet users reporting improved grades as a result, the platform has become the de-facto tool used in millions of classrooms. In this paper, we explore the task of recommending suitable content for a student to study, given their prior interests, as well as what their peers are studying. We propose a novel approach, i.e. Neural Educational Recommendation Engine (NERE), to recommend educational content by leveraging student behaviors rather than ratings. We have found that this approach better captures social factors that are more aligned with learning. NERE is based on a recurrent neural network that includes collaborative and content-based approaches for recommendation, and takes into account any particular student's speed, mastery, and experience to recommend the appropriate task. We train NERE by jointly learning the user embeddings and content embeddings, and attempt to predict the content embedding for the final timestamp. We also develop a confidence estimator for our neural network, which is a crucial requirement for productionizing this model. We apply NERE to Quizlet's proprietary dataset, and present our results. We achieved an R^2 score of 0.81 in the content embedding space, and a recall score of 54% on our 100 nearest neighbors. This vastly exceeds the recall@100 score of 12% that a standard matrix-factorization approach provides. We conclude with a discussion on how NERE will be deployed, and position our work as one of the first educational recommender systems for the K-12 space.

Perhaps the most transformative area of innovation in retail in recent years has been in the collection and interpretation of data. This happens to be the primary service Evo offers to clients. The simple reorganization of data can have a major impact on retail businesses. Most retailers segment data based on their best guess. Stores in similar regions get segmented together as do products with similar attributes.

If you're a black or Asian user of gay dating app Grindr, then it's possible you've encountered racism while using it. Some users of the app have said they've come across what they believe are discriminatory statements on other profiles - things like "no blacks and no Asians". Others say they've faced racist comments in conversation with users when they've rejected their advances. Now Grindr has taken a stand against discrimination on its platform and says no user is entitled to tear another down for "being who they are". It's launched the #KindrGrindr campaign to raise awareness of racism and discrimination and promote inclusivity among users. It says it will ban users who "bully or defame" others and will remove offensive language from profiles.

The work of an etiquette expert is never-ending. No sooner have you adjusted to a world in which the households you advise may have few or – whisper it – no staff, than the technology giants develop personal assistants using artificial intelligence. It is a whole new minefield and, as the Times reports, one already developing new expertise. One BBC tech executive told a conference audience on Tuesday that her solution to children developing poor manners due to Alexa, Siri and their rivals (the AI will respond whether you say "please" or not) was for adults in the house to say "please" and "thank you" to the AIs at all times. With that first step in mind, here is our extensive and scientific list of etiquette do's and don'ts when dealing with your AI assistant: Do: say please and thank you.

The restaurant industry has long been an early adopter of technology. With technology evolving, the restaurant has a new tool in its technology toolkit--artificial intelligence (AI). AI has the power to revolutionize every aspect of the restaurant industry and improve the customer experience. Consider the reality of voice-activated ordering. Dunkin' Donuts just announced its integration with Amazon's Alexa.

Artificial Intelligence is the present and future of marketing! From Apple's intelligent assistant Siri to self-driving cars, from Tesla to Netflix, Artificial Intelligence is transforming industries one after other. It is one of the best innovations of mankind! According to Wikipedia "Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals". We rely on Artificial Intelligence for our various day to day tasks!

From virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, to chatbots created by Facebook and Drift, AI is having a significant impact on the lives of consumers. A study from Statista showed that the number of consumers using virtual assistants worldwide is expected to exceed one billion in 2018. Additionally, a 2018 survey by Accenture projected that 37 percent of U.S. consumers will own a digital voice assistant (DVA) device by the end of 2018. It is readily apparent how AI-powered technology is making inroads into everyday life through DVAs and other consumer products, but AI is also having a transformative effect on an industry that impacts virtually all consumers and businesses: banking. Here are five ways that AI is already transforming the banking industry.