There's no question as to who the real technology star is now: it's you. Your voice is what hundreds of companies are vying to attract, with thousands of new products calling out for you to talk to them. Voice-activated technology has erupted over the last 12 months since Amazon's Alexa was informally crowned breakout technology champion of the CES 2017 consumer tech show. Seemingly by stealth, Amazon had snuck Alexa into a dizzying array of products and everywhere you turned, there she was. Alexa was the name on everyone's lips – literally – and Amazon had achieved this near-ubiquitous name- recognition without even having a stand at the gargantuan annual gadget-fest in Las Vegas.

A hotel room can make a guest feel welcome by proactively addressing their needs once they step into the room. Watson Assistant can set the room temperature and make dining recommendations based on preferences from past stays, turn on the lights and close the blinds depending on the time of day. IBM Watson is seeking to join the exclusive club occupied by Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant. At the IBM Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, IBM is set to announce the Watson Assistant, an artificial intelligent advisor that the company describes as an "AI enterprise assistant." "Enterprise" is the key clue not to think of Watson Assistant has another Alexa or Siri but rather a new product tailored to IBM Watson partners.

In this paper, we describe a solution to tackle a common set of challenges in e-commerce, which arise from the fact that new products are continually being added to the catalogue. The challenges involve properly personalising the customer experience, forecasting demand and planning the product range. We argue that the foundational piece to solve all of these problems is having consistent and detailed information about each product, information that is rarely available or consistent given the multitude of suppliers and types of products. We describe in detail the architecture and methodology implemented at ASOS, one of the world's largest fashion e-commerce retailers, to tackle this problem. We then show how this quantitative understanding of the products can be leveraged to improve recommendations in a hybrid recommender system approach.

Ther is as many frustrations with the whole "Alexa" product as their are benefits. Not specifically related to this echo dot version of it. The dot is the best way to open yourself to this world of IoT and voice enabled home, cheap and cheerful the tech is awesome, but it is let down by the company vying to gain market share along with its competitors. Remember when Silicon valley was run by dreamers and open source ideals like in the fist season of "Halt and catch fire!" if your a techie over 40...watch it! The echo for example, wont play from your Apple Itunes library because of business rivalry.

Google routinely fields product queries from millions of shoppers. Now, it wants to take a cut of their purchases, too. Under a new program, retailers can list their products on Google Search, as well as on the Google Express shopping service and Google Assistant. In exchange for Google listings and linking to retailer loyalty programs, the retailers pay Google a piece of each purchase, which is different from payments that retailers make to place ads on Google platforms. A new Google initiative called'Shopping Actions,' should help retailers fend off Amazon's growing dominance.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. At the moment, artificial intelligence may have perfect memories and be better at arithmetic than us, but they are clueless. It takes a few seconds of interaction with any digital assistant to realize one is not in the presence of a very bright interlocutor. Among some of the unexpected items users have found in their shopping lists after talking to (or near) Amazon's Alexa are 150,000 bottles of shampoo, sled dogs, "hunk of poo," and a girlfriend. The mere exasperation of talking to a personal assistant can be enough to miss human companionship, feel nostalgia of all things analog and dumb, and foreswear any future attempts at communicating with mindless pieces of metal inexplicably labelled "smart."

Too lazy to get out of bed to turn the lights on or off? Have I got a light switch for you! At its simplest, Lutron's Caséta Dimmer is a four-button in-wall light switch with both on/off and dimmer controls built in. But the real fun comes in the form of a wireless remote control that offers the same functions and which you can put just about anywhere. Whether that means dimming the bedroom lights from under the covers or controlling an exterior light from the other side of the house, the Caséta remote is versatile and, throughout my testing, never missed a beat.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to impact our lives faster than we can imagine. From Amazon's digital assistant Alexa, which is now in over five million homes, to online shopping recommendations and image recognition, AI technologies have found no shortages of real world applications that are quickly becoming a familiar part of our daily lives. Financial institutions are increasingly putting faith in AI to improve consumer personalisation and automate processes in real time - but is artificial intelligence just a fad or will it play a meaningful role for today's financial institutions? Banks are only just starting to explore the use cases for robotics and integrated biometrics (which can often be seem as gimmicks rather than long term solutions) but it's in the less visible areas where AI can have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction. And whether we realise it or not, we are already seeing the benefits of AI as part of the banking transformation journey.

One of the recent cover stories of'The Economist' emphasized on the importance that data has been gaining, stating "the world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data." Machine learning, which is bringing about the most dramatic advancements in artificial intelligence, is a data intensive technique. Lots of data is required to create, test and train the AI. As AI is gaining importance in the business world, so is data. AI is being leveraged by financial firms to advice customers on their investment choices, automakers are using it to build autopilot systems, and virtual assistants similar to Siri, Cortana are being introduced.

Tinder's parent company Match Group is suing dating app Bumble for alleged patent infringement. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Tinder's parent company Match Group is suing dating app Bumble for alleged patent infringement.