Big banks and financial companies have started to offer banking through virtual assistants -- Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Assistant -- in a way that will allow customers to check their balances, pay bills and, in the near future, send money just with their voice. And with the rapid adoption of Zelle, a bank-to-bank transfer system, it soon could be possible to send money to friends or family instantly with voice commands. But the potential to do such sensitive tasks through a smart speaker raises security concerns. Virtual assistants and smart speakers are still relatively new technologies, and potentially susceptible to being exploited by cyber criminals. Regional banking giant U.S. Bank is the first bank to be on all three services -- Alexa, Siri and Assistant.

More than 400 million people worldwide speak Spanish as their native language. However, those people have been left behind by tech companies who make products based on speaking and listening, like Google Home and Amazon Echo. On Tuesday, the former remedied the situation. Google announced in a company blog post Tuesday morning that its Home line of smart-speaker products would listen and speak Spanish, starting immediately. According to Google, it is as easy as going to the preferences section of the Google Home app and changing the digital assistant's language to Spanish.

Walking into my closet can sometimes feel like visiting Narnia. There are beautiful, whimsical friends in there, alongside a dizzying array of outdated pieces and random monstrosities from the early aughts. I'm someone who would benefit from Amazon's Echo Look, a standalone camera designed to snap photos of your outfits of the day and recommend clothes that suit your style. Aside from the chance to get reacquainted with my clothes, I also relished the excuse to take full-length selfies every day, all in the name of improving my already excellent taste. The Echo Look is a voice-enabled camera that's great for getting daily full-length photos and videos of your outfits. It also doubles as an Alexa speaker, which is nifty, although the audio quality is too poor to actually stream music.

Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa are useful for a lot of things, like telling you what the weather's going to be or reminding you of an upcoming calendar appointment. But they can be entertaining too, providing the occasional fun fact or playing that hit song from Beyonce. Or, when you want a little levity in an otherwise crappy day, telling some really corny dad jokes. You've probably heard them before. Ask Siri, Alexa, Google or Cortana to tell you a joke, and you'll likely hear something like this: "I couldn't figure out why a baseball kept getting larger. "What do you call a talking dinosaur?

Today, Google announced that Assistant on its Home, Mini and Max products can now speak and understand Spanish. Additionally, consumers in Mexico will be able to find Google Home on store shelves starting today; the product launched in Spain last week. After saying the wake words "Ok, Google," users can use Spanish to speak with Assistant on the Home, Mini and Max. To hear about your schedule and appointments for the day, you can say, "¿Cómo será mi día?" Or to turn down the temperature, simply tell the Assistant, "Sube la temperatura del termostato." These features are available today on the afore mentioned Google Home hardware.

Executing the perfect exercise move is as much about technique as it is strength. And fitness enthusiasts have been paying personal trainers for decades in order to learn how to correctly pull off the right moves. Now there's a free app that offers to do the same thing by using motion-tracking technology and artificial intelligence to help you perform the perfect squat. Called the Perfect Squat Challenge, it was developed by digital therepy company Kaia Health who consulted with physiotherapists and sport scientists to figure out a squat that most of us can achieve. Once you fire up the app, you're guided through the motion by a virtual assistant called Kaia.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 21, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Cerego, an AI-driven platform that optimizes how people learn, today announced the launch of Cerego Insights, as well as a Cerego skill for Amazon Alexa, onstage at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Summit 2018. Cerego Insights uses machine learning models to objectively understand learners' cognitive and behavioral strengths, and predict future performance. The new Cerego Insights offering goes beyond the company's core competency of knowledge acquisition and memory management. Instructors and managers can now instantly access each individual and group's cognitive and behavioral profile. These attributes include specific, validated scores for Agility, Diligence, and Knowledge.

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Two years after originally announcing it, Medtronic and IBM Watson have launched their joint platform the Sugar.IQ, a digital diabetes assistant. "It is designed for people who are currently using Guardian Connect; so made for people on multiple daily injections. It is a personal assistant a little bit like Alexa or Siri," Huzefa Neemuchwala, global head of digital health solutions and AI at Medtronic, said in a Facebook live informational session. "It is an intelligent assistant that keeps track of all of your information and has all of your information in one place. Then through Watson technology we use this information to power insights so we can better manage your diabetes so that you can spend more time in range."

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games have received increasing popularity recently. In a match of such games, players compete in two teams of five, each controlling an in-game avatars, known as heroes, selected from a roster of more than 100. The selection of heroes, also known as pick or draft, takes place before the match starts and alternates between the two teams until each player has selected one hero. Heroes are designed with different strengths and weaknesses to promote team cooperation in a game. Intuitively, heroes in a strong team should complement each other's strengths and suppressing those of opponents. Hero drafting is therefore a challenging problem due to the complex hero-to-hero relationships to consider. In this paper, we propose a novel hero recommendation system that suggests heroes to add to an existing team while maximizing the team's prospect for victory. To that end, we model the drafting between two teams as a combinatorial game and use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for estimating the values of hero combinations. Our empirical evaluation shows that hero teams drafted by our recommendation algorithm have significantly higher win rate against teams constructed by other baseline and state-of-the-art strategies.