Controversial vlogger Logan Paul has knocked Zoella off the top spot as UK children's favourite YouTuber, according to a study. Paul was embroiled in a row earlier this year when he posted a video showing the body of an apparent suicide victim. His rise suggested children were seeking "edgier" content, said an analyst for research firm Childwise. It was likely children had been exposed to "shocking content", he added. The Childwise study looked at the media habits of 2,000 children in the UK aged five to 16.

Is Alexa about to get a new voice? In a teaser video posted over the weekend the popular digital assistant appears to have "lost her voice," news that shocks the world as well as Amazon founder/world's richest man/actor Jeff Bezos. "How is that even possible?" The employees try to calm their leader by saying that they have replacements ready, but Bezos, demonstrating his acting range, does not appear convinced. The teaser then fades to the trademark Amazon "smile" and the date "2.4.18" when the full ad, and the answer to this giant question, will be revealed.

Canadian financial services virtual assistant startup Finn.ai has become the latest fintech firm to bring in a Twitter veteran, hiring the social media outfit's former head of global financial data partnerships, Stephen Morse.

Amazon's personal assistant Alexa has lost her voice ahead of the launch of Apple's HomePod smart speaker. However, there's nothing to worry about because the e-commerce company is simply updating Alexa's software in preparation for its rival's new product. Amazon recently released a sneak peek at its upcoming Super Bowl LII commercial. The 30-second clip published over YouTube shows a dramatic turn of events starting with a female user asking Alexa about the weather. The digital assistant manages to start its response, but then it coughs and goes silent, causing the Amazon Echo user to worry. The teaser then cuts to a different scene showing a television reporter announcing, "Amazon's Alexa lost her voice this morning."

A collaborative filtering model leverages similarity between your users to make suggestions rather than focusing on concrete details about a particular item. Typically these systems use rating or purchase history to compare users to each other. The distance between pairs of users is calculated, and a particular user is matched to others that are "close" to him or her (i.e. have similar tastes). For a clothing company employing this model, a user would be shown a Balmain jacket if their transaction history was similar to another user who went on to purchase that jacket. In contrast, with a content-based system, that recommendation would have been made based solely on that user's history, without considering the behavior of others.

In many settings people must give numerical scores to entities from a small discrete set. For instance, rating physical attractiveness from 1--5 on dating sites, or papers from 1--10 for conference reviewing. We study the problem of understanding when using a different number of options is optimal. For concreteness we assume the true underlying scores are integers from 1--100. We consider the case when scores are uniform random and Gaussian. We study when using 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10 options is optimal in these models. One may expect that using more options would always improve performance in this model, but we show that this is not necessarily the case, and that using fewer choices---even just two---can surprisingly be optimal in certain situations. While in theory for this setting it would be optimal to use all 100 options, in practice this is prohibitive, and it is preferable to utilize a smaller number of options due to humans' limited computational resources. Our results suggest that using a smaller number of options than is typical could be optimal in certain situations. This would have many potential applications, as settings requiring entities to be ranked by humans are ubiquitous.

The options for Alexa- and Google Assistant–powered speakers have exploded, as evidenced by companies adding voice control to any and every device at the last two CESes. As is typically the case when pretty much everyone hops on a bandwagon, there's some good and a lot of bad. The concept of voice control is still new to a lot of people, so when they do splurge for that first device, it had better work right. Sony's LF-S50G harnesses the smarts of Google Assistant to do just that, but it's far from perfect. Sony's smart speaker sounds better than a lot of the competition, but gesture controls need some fine-tuning.

Today, WhatsApp introduced a new app update that adds compatibility with Carplay. The additional functionality was first noted on the Dutch site iCulture, and it's automatically available who those who update to version 2.18.20 of the app. WhatsApp users who have a vehicle that is CarPlay enabled can now see unread messages, ask Siri to read them messages and use the voice assistant to send new messages. Users will also receive notifications of new messages with the name of the sender. The ability to scroll through a list of messages is not available, however.

Preface: Lately we hear too many news about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Google, IBM, Apple, Microsoft etc. years ago announced "mobile" support. Today, mobile is obvious, and to differentiate, they claim to use "AI". The word "AI" for most people can be only the sci-fi movies AI, since we get too many AI movies too: Her, Ex Machina, … and even "Alien: Covenant" is about a rogue AI, the aliens are secondary. Companies went mobile for real: their services run in cell phones. But, we don't see sci-fi "AI" in any service like Alexa, Cortana, Siri etc.

If you liked the concept of ONvocal's OV Bluetooth headset, but skipped it because you didn't like the combination of in-ear headphones and a neckband, you'll want to check out 66 Audio's Pro Voice cans. These on-ear headphones host only Amazon's Alexa (the OV supported Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri), but they're simpler to operate, far more comfortable to wear, and--most importantly--they sound better. The Pro Voice are clearly designed for audio performance first. They sound much better than you'd expect for their $140 price tag. The fact that you can use them to summon Alexa to do your bidding--be it controlling your smart home, reminding you of your day's appointments, or playing your daily flash briefing--is just the icing on a sweet sonic cake.