Music is a necessity while I'm working. Of course, if you don't want to bother those around you with what you're listening to, you need a good set of headphones. The best options will also do a good job of blocking out the outside world. We've already offered some suggestions on the best wireless earbuds, so now it's time to examine the best over-ear wireless headphones. Each was selected for its mix of comfort, sound quality and effective noise cancellation.

March 20, 2018 Written by: Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D. Over the last few years, digital assistants have cemented their place in our homes, helping execute routine day-to-day tasks, from turning on our televisions to telling us about "this day in history." But these devices have also accomplished something else, they have laid the groundwork for what's next: truly intelligent AI assistants that get to know you. Today at Think 2018, IBM introduced Watson Assistant, a smart enterprise assistant that brings together artificial intelligence (AI), cloud and the Internet of Things (IoT) to help businesses enhance brand loyalty and transform customer experiences, while keeping the business and customer data private and secure. Right now, leading brands are joining us to bring Watson Assistant into our daily lives.

That's the warning of a whole range of experts who warn that the connected home – the idea that appliances and gadgets throughout the home – might be turned on their users. The technology is intended to make life easier for the people who use it, but like many new developments comes with terrifying warnings for their users. That's because the same things required to use the smart home – internet connections, microphones and cameras – also make them perfect targets for hackers. And because they occupy such an intimate place in people's homes, once they're spying on you they can learn some of the most intimate data there is. Those problems primarily hit cheap devices, many of which are made with little interest in how private they are.

About a month ago, Google announced that 30 more languages would be coming to Google Assistant "over the next few months." The languages mentioned there included Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish, among others. Of those, the only one that has arrived thus far is Hindi, but Indonesian is now taking second place. Language support is pretty confusing in Google-land. Allo is the only Google voice service that already supported Indonesian, but the newly-added Assistant is the most important one since it's what people will be using from their phones and tablets.

An error on the dating app Grindr allowed third party sites to access personal information. Tony Spitz has the details. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. An error on the dating app Grindr allowed third party sites to access personal information.

Now that baseball season is underway, one of the easiest ways to listen to the games is on an Amazon Echo or another Alexa device. With TuneIn Live or MLB At Bat, you can stream live broadcasts from any Major League Baseball game using voice commands. TuneIn's service costs $3 per month for Amazon Prime subscribers (or $4 per month for non-subscribers) and also includes news and live sports from other leagues. MLB's Gameday Audio service costs a one-time payment of $20 for the entire 2018 season. Audio streams are also included with an MLB TV Premium subscription, which offers live video broadcasts for out-of-market games and costs $25 per month or $116 for the season.

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read their continuously updated list of deals here. We've seen the Echo Show as low as $150 on one rare occasion, but this drop to $160 is still a very nice discount from the typical $230 street price. We saw a similar deal last week and it's good to see it back, confirming a trend that has seen the Show drop below $200 with greater frequency this year.

Google's Home speaker range can now connect to any Bluetooth speaker in your house. The addition means Google Home users can turn any speaker into a voice-controlled sound system - though they will have to bark all commands through the AI-assistant. In a blog post on the update Google said the extra connectivity allows Home users to'amp up the sound' of the compact gadgets. Google's Home speaker range, including its Home Mini (pictured), can now connect to any Bluetooth speaker in your house. 'We brought this feature to life after hearing how much you wanted to amp up the sound with your Google Home Mini,' the company said.

Google has released an update to its Google Home devices and it now lets users connect their smart speakers to Bluetooth speakers. The update is great for Google Home Mini users who may want a better listening experience, or for those who want to use their smart speakers for multi-room listening. "We brought this feature to life after hearing how much you wanted to amp up the sound with your Google Home Mini," Google said on its blog. "Now any of your Google Home devices can connect to other Bluetooth speakers so you can control your entertainment experience simply using the sound of your voice." To pair a Google Home device to a Bluetooth speaker, users must first open the Google Home app on their mobile device.

In this continuation of "Hybrid content-based and collaborative filtering recommendations wi..." I will describe the application of the {ordinal} clm() function to test a new, hybrid content-based, collaborative filtering approach to recommender engines by fitting a class of ordinal logistic (aka ordered logit) models to ratings data from the MovieLens 100K dataset. All R code used in this project can be obtained from the respective GitHub repository; the chunks of code present in the body of the post illustrate the essential steps only. The MovieLens 100K dataset can be obtained from the GroupLens research laboratory of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. This second part of the study relies on the R code in OrdinalRecommenders_3.R and presents the model training, cross-validation, and the analyses. But before we proceed to approach the recommendation problem from a viewpoint of discrete choice modeling, let me briefly remind you of the results of the feature engineering phase and explain what happens in OrdinalRecommenders_2.R which prepares the data frames that are passed to clm().