The Echo smart speaker, powered by Amazon's artificially intelligent assistant Alexa, keeps a digital ear out for its wake phrase, "Hey Alexa." When it hears these words, it starts recording the sounds that come next--your spoken commands--and then it saves these snippets in the cloud. But if it really makes you uncomfortable, then manually make the speaker stop listening when you're not using it: Tap the microphone button on the top of the device, and it will stop listening for your next "hey Alexa." To review and potentially delete the snippets that the Echo has been saving, you have to go through the Alexa app (for Android and iOS) or the Amazon website. Let's start with the former. When you open the Alexa app on your phone, the front page displays a list of saved words and phrases that you've directed at your Echo speaker.

The game maker showed a shred of self-awareness of its endless wringing of the long-running franchise and faux-introduced Skyrim: Very Special Edition, a voice-based reimagining of the RPG for Alexa. It does look better than Pac-Man...

You need sound that matches the picture you paid for. You could set up a full surround-sound system--even a wireless one--which can offer superlative audio quality but requires serious money and time. Or you could go the easier route and get a soundbar. Drop a long brick of speakers on your TV stand, plug it in, and revel in the new sound. Even stereo bars that cost around $100--such as Vizio's 29" Sound Bar and the AmazonBasics model with built-in subwoofer--will put your TV speakers to shame.

Smart speakers or virtual assistants, whatever name you decide to call them, they are very useful, handy, and they are winning the world. There is a statistics showing smart speakers are now owned by one in six Americans. Those products are not only used in home automation, but also in business. Initially, maybe the smart speakers have been launched with another purpose in mind. But now everything has entirely changed. Say, Amazon Echo should be made to boost the sales.

Father's Day is right around the corner, meaning if you haven't already thought of a few gifts for your dad it's probably about time. Luckily, we're here to help you out. There are a ton of things you could get for your tech-savvy father -- but not all of those things are worth sinking your cash in to. That's why we've put together this guide. To help you figure out what to get for your tech-savvy father for father's day.

Aigo.ai has announced the launch of their decentralized community for the world's first truly personal personal assistant. The development of the community is the final piece in the creation of a revolutionary AI assistant that is hyper-personalized to individual needs, desires, and goals - and most importantly, provides you, and only you, with the ability to keep and own all the information and data you share with it. Peter Voss, Chief Scientist at Aigo.ai and a pioneer in the artificial intelligence space, has developed Aigo using groundbreaking "cognitive architecture" to implement the "Third Wave of AI" - learning unsupervised, instantaneously and interactively. With significantly greater cognitive ability than today's Siri, Alexa, and other chatbot technologies, Peter and his team envision Aigo as the foundation for implementing what they call a true "ExoCortex," which they define as an everyday, interactive, cognitive extension of ourselves. The Aigo community will be vital to his team's vision of creating this new category of personal assistants – becoming a hive of intelligence, free of advertising, corporate ownership, and agendas.

Syphilis might be more commonly associated with centuries past. But it's been on the rise for the past decade in England, with more cases last year than in any year since 1949. The disease was, in effect, eradicated in the UK in the mid-80s only to re-emerge around 1999. BBC Reality Check wanted to know why this ancient disease is rearing its head in England in the 21st Century. Syphilis is a bacterial infection that can be treated with antibiotics.

AI for customer service tools allow mega corporations to use all the data they collect to better understand consumer behavior and derive predictive insights to boost sales, while theoretically improving the customer experience by delivering personalized recommendations. The irony, of course, is that these hyper-personalization tools also serve to prevent customers from having personal interactions with the people at those companies. We're so accustomed to getting what we need from automated systems -- be it our preference to use the ticketing kiosk at the airport instead of speaking with an agent at the counter or the ATM at the bank we rely on in lieu of a teller -- that many of us only seek out a person when automation fails. I, for one, will pick up the phone and talk to a customer service agent only as a last resort. I prefer to find solutions to product problems using self-service platforms or instant messaging chats, and I don't really care whether the agent on the other end of that platform is live or virtual as long as they resolve the issue quickly.

The key is a new feature called shortcuts, akin to the "routines" in Google's Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. Shortcuts will let you set up Siri to perform an action or series of actions when it hears you speak a particular command. These actions will be able to dig into the functionality of a third-party app: Apple's examples included a shortcut that lets you use a Tile locator gizmo to find your keys, and another that allows you to pull up travel information from within the Kayak app. Shortcuts will be available across the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and HomePod. Their importance to the iOS platform will go beyond Siri itself; power users have begged Apple for more automation features within iOS for years, and that's exactly what shortcuts offer.

Here are 21 commands that even seasoned Echo users may not know. Many of them are useful, some are fun, and others give the illusion that Alexa is as cognizant as we are. Ask Alexa how to treat cuts, burns, fevers and more. More than any other device, Alexa has become our closest approximation of artificial intelligence. Amazon's voice assistant has a voice and personality, and if you ask the right question, it'll even get sassy with you.