Amazon's Prime Day sale launched the evening of Monday, July 16 and will run through July 17, 2018. SAN FRANCISCO – As with all sales, the trick during Amazon's Prime Day is knowing what's really a deal and what's just hype. One market research firm found that only half the items it tracked during the week of the sale were cheaper. Ahead of Amazon's fourth Prime Day on July 16, USA TODAY reviewed pricing analyses from at least four market-tracking firms to determine whether criticism of the 36-hour sales event -- that some sellers use it to clear out undesirable stock before the holidays -- was valid. Or whether shoppers could find deals on items they really wanted.

From The Terminator to Blade Runner, pop culture has always leaned towards a chilling depiction of artificial intelligence (AI) and our future with AI at the helm. Recent headlines about Facebook panicking because their AI bots developed a language of their own have us hitting the alarm button once again. Should we really feel unsettled with an AI future? News flash: that future is here. If you ask Siri, the helpful assistant who magically lives inside your phone, to read text messages and emails to you, find the nearest pizza place or call your mother for you, then you've made AI a part of your everyday life.

From USD 2.3 trillion in 2017, the worth of eCommerce transactions is estimated to reach USD 4.88 trillion in 2021. But the meager contribution of eCommerce in the total retail sales (In the same period, from 10.2% to 17.5%) explains a huge gap which, in fact, is an opportunity to tap into. Wisitech explores its critical usability in our regular business. How Familiar are We to AI or Artificial Intelligence? You might have noticed your kid making use of Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana or Amazon Alexa to seek answers from Google, control devices, and apps, or place an order on Amazon.

Latent factor models for recommender systems represent users and items as low dimensional vectors. Privacy risks have been previously studied mostly in the context of recovery of personal information in the form of usage records from the training data. However, the user representations themselves may be used together with external data to recover private user information such as gender and age. In this paper we show that user vectors calculated by a common recommender system can be exploited in this way. We propose the privacy-adversarial framework to eliminate such leakage, and study the trade-off between recommender performance and leakage both theoretically and empirically using a benchmark dataset. We briefly discuss further applications of this method towards the generation of deeper and more insightful recommendations.

Siri, Alexa and Cortana all started out as female. Now a group of marketing executives, tech experts and academics are trying to make virtual assistants more egalitarian. Siri, Alexa and Cortana all started out as female. Now a group of marketing executives, tech experts and academics are trying to make virtual assistants more egalitarian. Have you ever noticed something most virtual assistants have in common?

Top Republican lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters Monday asking Apple and Google for more information on how extensively their smartphones track people's locations and record snippets of their conversations. The questions from lawmakers come amid a broader scrutiny from Capitol Hill into how the underlying, everyday practices of technology companies may infringe on Americans' privacy. Congressional hearings with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed several lawmakers were troubled by the amount of data that the social network collects on a regular basis. In the letters to Google and Apple, lawmakers said the committee is "reviewing the business practices that may impact the privacy expectations of Americans." The letters ask Larry Page -- the chief executive of Google's parent company Alphabet -- and Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, for more specific information on how their phones collect location information at times when many people may not expect.

Top Republican lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent letters Monday asking Apple and Google for more information on how extensively their smartphones track people's locations and record snippets of their conversations. The questions from lawmakers come amid a broader scrutiny from Capitol Hill into how the underlying, everyday practices of technology companies may infringe on Americans' privacy. Congressional hearings with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed several lawmakers were troubled by the amount of data that the social network collects on a regular basis. In the letters to Google and Apple, lawmakers said the committee is "reviewing the business practices that may impact the privacy expectations of Americans." The letters ask Larry Page -- the chief executive of Google's parent company Alphabet -- and Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, for more specific information on how their phones collect location information at times when many people may not expect.

The explosive growth of in-home artificial intelligence assistants has many companies scrambling to develop apps and "skills" to keep up with the new technology. But many are doing so without a clear strategy. The same thing could be said about chatbots, virtual reality and even social media. Why are companies in such a rush to be first to market with new technology, even with a potentially inferior product? According to the Smart Audio Report from NPR and Edison Research, one in six Americans now has a smart speaker.

Last week we told you about a killer deal on the original Pixel (which is still going on), but if you'd rather get some of Google's newest products for less, now's the time to act. Pixels, Chromecasts, and Google Home speakers are all on steep sales through July 17. The Pixel 2 XL, Google's premier smartphone, is $100 off both the 64GB and 128GB models, bringing them down to $749 and $849 respectively. The phone easily earned our Editors' Choice award for its great all-around performance, but the Pixel 2 XL's blending of a top-of-the-line mobile camera with Google's A.I. magic results in one of the most fun, elegant camera experiences you'll find in a camera today. And if you want to use the phone's power to wander worlds in virtual reality, the 2nd-gen Daydream View headset is on sale for $49, 50 percent off its $99 list price. The Google Home Max is a beefy smart speaker.

Dish launched Alexa support for its Hopper and Wally set-top boxes last year, so the devices can already do your bidding with just a spoken command. Now, the satellite TV provider is giving you another voice control option: one that should make you happy if you prefer Google's AI to Amazon's. So long as you have an Android device, an iPhone loaded with the AI's app or an Assistant device such as a Home speaker or a Home mini, you can navigate its channels and shows with your voice. You can ask Assistant to play, pause, fast-forward, rewind and adjust the volume of what you're watching. If you have no idea what to watch, you can also search for shows based on channel, title, actor and genre.