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.

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.

Lawmakers, child development experts, and privacy advocates are expressing concerns about two new Amazon products targeting children, questioning whether they prod kids to be too dependent on technology and potentially jeopardize their privacy. In a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Friday, two members of the bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus raised concerns about Amazon's smart speaker Echo Dot Kids and a companion service called FreeTime Unlimited that lets kids access a children's version of Alexa, Amazon's voice-controlled digital assistant. "While these types of artificial intelligence and voice recognition technology offer potentially new educational and entertainment opportunities, Americans' privacy, particularly children's privacy, must be paramount," wrote Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas), both cofounders of the privacy caucus. The letter includes a dozen questions, including requests for details about how audio of children's interactions is recorded and saved, parental control over deleting recordings, a list of third parties with access to the data, whether data will be used for marketing purposes, and Amazon's intentions on maintaining a profile on kids who use these products. Echo Dot Kids is the latest in a wave of products from dominant tech players targeting children, including Facebook's communications app Messenger Kids and Google's YouTube Kids, both of which have been criticized by child health experts concerned about privacy and developmental issues.

"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." This week I was once again reminded of that quote by science fiction writer, William Gibson, when I witnessed (via YouTube) Google Assistant's latest capabilities being demonstrated to stunning effect at the annual Google I/O developer conference. The scenario involved Google Assistant calling a hair salon and engaging in a natural-language dialog with the real-life receptionist to successfully book a hair appointment. I could have sworn that a human being was making that call, down to the "mm-hmms", pauses and inflections.

Many e-commerce and retail companies are leveraging the power of data and boosting sales by implementing recommender systems on their websites. In short, these systems aim to predict users' interests and recommend items that quite likely are interesting for them. Data required for recommender systems stems from explicit user ratings after watching a movie or listening to a song, from implicit search engine queries and purchase histories, or from other knowledge about the users/items themselves. Sites like Spotify, YouTube or Netflix use that data in order to suggest playlists, so-called Daily mixes, or to make video recommendations, respectively. In this blog post, we'll describe the broad types of the most popular recommender systems and give insights into how they work, going through a few examples. To give some motivation on the subject and help decide whether it's a worthwhile investment, we'll point to some real-life case studies, talk about the high level requirements for implementing recommender systems, and discuss how they can be evaluated fairly.

AI and Blockchain have been making waves in the tech world for several years now -- key drivers to popular technologies like chatbots, cryptocurrency, personal assistants (i.e. Get the entire 10-part series on Timeless Reading in PDF. Save it to your desktop, read it on your tablet, or email to your colleagues. As these technologies individually mature and see a wider range of applications, it's becoming more clear that they are headed towards a convergence, whether it be to improve self-driving cars or make mining Bitcoins more efficient. TiE Inflect has put together a handy infographic on where both technologies stand, and how they can work together -- however, if you're unfamiliar with AI and Blockchain, here's a little background on them: Artificial Intelligence -- AI for short -- is the capability of a machine, such as a computer, to imitate intelligent human behavior.

"Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships," Alexa says. It's something that Amazon knows very, very well, and is using to its advantage to continue leading in the smart speaker wars, which are of course just a prelude to our future of ambient, invisible computing. Every week I get a new email from Amazon Echo. Every single week there are significant, interesting, trivial, and funny new things that Alexa can do. This week for instance, Amazon's letting me know that just by asking, I can get Alexa to block all songs with explicit lyrics from playing in Amazon Music. Also, Alexa can tell me how many points King James is averaging in his demolition of LeBronto, or where I can buy flowers for Mother's Day.