Now that Google Assistant has a slew of voices to choose from, shouldn't you have an easy interface for picking one of those voices? Google is rolling out an update that gives US users a new, simple interface for changing Assistant's voice. It's very colorful, to put it mildly: you just tap on a color associated with a given voice (Google told us it chose them at random) and listen to be sure they're the dulcet tones you want to hear. The addition should be platform-agnostic and will be widely available in the US by the end of the week. It's not certain when other countries will receive the fresh interface, but that's also dependent on having multi-voice support in the first place.

In a market such as this, Sonos--with trailing 12-month sales now just topping $1 billion--would appear hopelessly outclassed. But papers for an initial public offering filed on Friday show that the maker of high-end wireless speakers still has a hand it can play. After being caught flat-footed by the surging popularity of Amazon Echo speakers in late 2015, Sonos shifted its approach. The company struck a deal to embed Amazon's Alexa voice technology into its own line of smart speakers, the first of which began shipping late last year. That helped Sonos deliver a 36% jump in device unit sales year over year for the first quarter ended December, with revenue rising 26% to $469 million.

Apple is creating a new AI/ML team that brings together its Core ML and Siri teams under one leader in John Giannandrea. Apple confirmed this morning that the combined Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team, which houses Siri, will be led by the recent hire, who came to Apple this year after an eight-year stint at Google, where he led the Machine Intelligence, Research and Search teams. Before that he founded Metaweb Technologies and Tellme. The internal structures of the Siri and Core ML teams will remain the same, but they will now answer to Giannandrea. Apple's internal structure means that the teams will likely remain integrated across the org as they're wedded to various projects, including developer tools, mapping, Core OS and more.

Apple has selected former Google executive John Giannandrea to lead a new artificial intelligence and machine learning team, the company confirmed on Tuesday.

AI continues to evolve and pervade business functions and applications across industries. In retail, AI's use has moved well beyond warehouse management and e-commerce algorithms. Companies are now deploying it to help solve far more complex problems and facilitate functions across their businesses. In this report, our second in the Artificial Intelligence in Retail series, we outline some of the key areas in which 30 global retailers are using AI across business functions. We also examine in detail how two of the largest global technology-led retailers, Amazon and Alibaba Group, are using AI in alignment with our proprietary CORE framework.

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When talking about Artificial Intelligence, some people think about the destruction of the world and killer robots, but Artificial Intelligence is already playing a major role in our lives, non-destructively. We all are familiar with programs such as Siri and Google Now, which are improving our way of life. Similarly, you must have played chess against the computer, in which most people get beat atrociously. These programs are nothing but artificial intelligence, which is designed to assist us with a set of protocols. Similar programs are self-driving cars, or motion and reflex detecting video games, which evolve as time goes along.

This is new territory for families. For the first time, children who are too young to distinguish fantasy from reality are engaging with devices powered by artificial intelligence. Many see smart speakers as magical, imbue them with human traits and boss them around like a Marine drill sergeant, according to several new studies in the past year. Hunter Walk, a San Francisco venture capitalist, worried that his family's Amazon Echo "is turning our daughter into a raging asshole," he wrote in a blog post in 2016, because of the 4-year-old's tendency to boss it around. He has since set rules around how to talk to the device and said he hasn't noticed any rude behavior by his daughter, who is now 6. "I still have concerns," Mr. Walk says.

Recruit these AI assistants to help you escape from pointless work. Future you will thank you. For many of us, an unfortunate amount of our time is spent on a thousand little tasks that support the truly meaningful work we do, but those thousand menial tasks aren't meaningful themselves. Hours wasted sending emails, replying to emails, booking meetings, attending meetings, reporting on meetings, sending project updates, submitting tickets…you get the idea. Often these tasks are referred to as metawork, or in other words, work about work (just like metadata is data about data).

A recent college grad living in rural Connecticut, they'd been subject to the swipe-and-ghost thing a few too many times. Then, this spring, Juniper submitted an ad to @_personals_, an Instagram for lesbian, queer, transgender, and non-binary people looking for love (and other stuff). The post, titled "TenderQueer Butch4Butch," took Juniper two weeks to craft, but the care paid off: the ad ultimately garnered well over 1,000 likes--and more than 200 messages. Tinder's Days as a Hookup App May Be Over "I was so used to the Tinder culture of nobody wanting to text back," Juniper says. "All of the sudden I had hundreds of queers flooding my inbox trying to hang out."