Google Home is getting a long-awaited feature: Bluetooth. Previously, only Google Cast-enabled speakers could be looped in to a network of Home-commanded devices. Now users can pair their speaker of choice with the dedicated Home app and voice command it to play your tunes or podcasts. You don't even have to specify the speaker: By making it the default audio projector, just use the Home-standard "Hey Google" prompt and voice-command away. Users can even add a Bluetooth speaker to a group, if they have one set up.

Google Home and Google Home Mini might be good at finding songs you want to hear, but they're not the best at playing them. Compared to higher-priced speakers such as Google Home Max and Apple's HomePod, Google's diminutive devices sound exactly as you'd expect: small, tinny, and muddled. Google has heard your complaints. Starting today, you can hook up a Bluetooth speaker to your Google Home without needing to purchase a separate Chromecast dongle. Once you pair a compatible Bluetooth speaker with one of your Homes, you can make it the default for playing music, so you won't have to fiddle with controls or tell your Home where to send your favorite songs.

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It is midnight on January 18, 2017, and the Outbrain Click Prediction machine learning competition has just finished. It has been three and a half months of working late. As I scroll through the leaderboard page, I found my name in the 19th position, which was the top 2% from nearly 1,000 competitors. Not bad for the first Kaggle competition I had decided to put a real effort in! One of the reasons why I managed to score well was the fact that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) made my life easier and I could focus on the data.

This is the first time we've seen the Apple HomePod on sale (Photo: Apple) 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. Apple finally joined the smart assistant party in February with the release of the Apple HomePod. At $349.99, it's also the most expensive compared to Amazon's Echo or Google Assistant. But if you're an Apple die-hard, it might be the only smart speaker you want so you can sync it with your other Apple products.

Facebook has decided not to unveil its new home products range at the firm's developer conference in May. Mark Zuckerberg had planned to use the occasion to launch its smart speakers, which come equipped with a digital assistant and video chat. The decision comes in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which saw details from 50 million Facebook users leaked to political activists. Believed to have operated on behalf of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, the information was used to target voters in the US based on psychological profiling. The scandal has led to many users debating whether to delete their profiles on the social network, with the hashtag #DeleteFacebook trending on Twitter.

We are well into 2018 and it is already looking at the watershed year for technology. A more efficient way to "discover" these services will make it even easier for the users to extract full benefit from their smart home appliance. We are finally getting close to practical, flexible, easy to build ad-hoc solutions for home automation. We will see more and more appliances growing ears and programmable brains guided by Echo, Google Home and HomePods. AI and capsule: Neural networks are passé – AI now comes in a capsule!

The recent successes of AI have captured the wildest imagination of both the scientific communities and the general public. Robotics and AI amplify human potentials, increase productivity and are moving from simple reasoning towards human-like cognitive abilities. Current AI technologies are used in a set area of applications, ranging from healthcare, manufacturing, transport, energy, to financial services, banking, advertising, management consulting and government agencies. The global AI market is around 260 billion USD in 2016 and it is estimated to exceed 3 trillion by 2024. To understand the impact of AI, it is important to draw lessons from it's past successes and failures and this white paper provides a comprehensive explanation of the evolution of AI, its current status and future directions.

Many recommendation algorithms rely on user data to generate recommendations. However, these recommendations also affect the data obtained from future users. This work aims to understand the effects of this dynamic interaction. We propose a simple model where users with heterogeneous preferences arrive over time. Based on this model, we prove that naive estimators, i.e. those which ignore this feedback loop, are not consistent. We show that consistent estimators are efficient in the presence of myopic agents. Our results are validated using extensive simulations.

Artificial Intelligence is often overlooked as being a general-purpose application technology that already inhabits many aspects of our lives. We're bombarded with prophecies of the'future' of AI, Skynet-inspired stories and doomsday divinations. But what about the way in which AI is already integrated into our daily lives and has improved our current technologies? Whether we're wanting to find directions to the nearest cafe or settle a debate, Siri, Cortana and Alexa (among others), have our backs. Intelligent personal assistants are at our disposal. As a program, they use location data, user input and a variety of database information to carry out requests from both voice command and text.