With less than 72 hours until its release, the first HomePod reviews are in from a hand-picked group of media outlets, and they're very positive--as long as you're buying Apple's $349 smart speaker for sound quality. The Homepod's "smarts," though, leave much to be desired. That's not a total surprise, since Siri is woefully inadequate on other devices and Apple hadn't given us any indication that it has enhanced Siri for HomePod. But in action it's even worse than we expected. Brian X. Chen of The New York Times laments Siri's capabilities on the new speaker and concludes that "Siri doesn't even work as well on HomePod as it does on the iPhone."

HomePod may be a latecomer on the smart loudspeaker scene but Apple's entry onto the dance floor is about to liven up the party. At least for well-heeled Apple diehards who share my passion for all kinds of music. If you fit that description and are willing to fork over $349 plus embrace the subscription-only Apple Music streaming service, HomePod is well worth the wait, an outcome I reached after testing the speaker for just shy of a week. Apple makes no bones that HomePod is a music-first speaker, and it sounds terrific, all the more notable given how small it is. Vocals were pure, bass deep. At the same time, the new speaker can be an exercise in frustration at times, especially when you request something of Siri that Apple's digital assistant can't deliver on HomePod.

The HomePod speaker is photographed in a a showroom during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 5, 2017, in San Jose, Calif. You can almost detect the reverberations in and around Cupertino, Calif., as Apple prepares to start selling its expensive and delayed HomePod speaker with Siri in stores Friday. Its first smart speaker enters a three-year-old market where first mover Amazon now drowns out its rivals with an estimated 70% share. Amazon's Alexa digital assistant and Google Assistant, the voice of the year-old Google Home, have trained tens of millions of consumers to equate smart speakers with the ability to answer a broad set of requests in an increasingly human-like way. Apple, in contrast, is going all in on music -- defending a price tag that's about $250 more than the basic Amazon Echo by touting its premium audio specs and integration with Apple music ecosystem, rather than the number of ways digital assistant Siri can insert itself into your life. "We never wanted to lose the focus that (HomePod is) first about making a speaker that plays back music in a surprising really great way," Apple's senior vice president for worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said moments after leading a tour of journalists through a working audio testing lab where acoustic and engineering teams first started working on HomePod a half-dozen years ago.

The Apple HomePod is Apple's smart hi-fi speaker, with a big emphasis on hi-fi quality audio. So how does it look and sound, and exactly how smart is it? We've been using the HomePod for the last week. It manages to be good-looking without dominating, perhaps because it's so compact, which means that you can put it in most rooms and barely notice it's there. It comes in two colours: white and space grey. The mesh finish is a soft-touch cover that's pleasing to the touch and acoustically transparent.

Joshua Montgomery, CEO of Mycroft AI, has a bone to pick with Amazon Alexa, the voice-controlled digital helper that companies such as Toyota, Ford and BMW have integrated into vehicles. "Even though [the car] may run a voice assistant from a tech company, you can't use it to check what the tire pressure is," Montgomery said. He turned his gripe into an idea: an independent, white-label digital assistant that automakers can customize for use in their vehicles. Last year, the startup honed the product by putting it into a Jaguar F-Type test vehicle at Jaguar Land Rover's tech incubator in Portland, Ore. Now, nestled amongst dozens of startups at CES 2018's Eureka Park, Montgomery was courting carmakers, pitching freedom from Silicon Valley's dominant positioning.

The recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show, CES 2018, has revealed the latest innovations and tech trends. The world's largest tech event was held from January 9 – 12 at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Nevada, US. The annual tech show witnessed some awesome tech novelties that will become part of our lives in the coming years. Keeping a tab on some of these tech trends will help you stay smart in this super digital world. Have a look at some of the dominant technology advances that rocked the CES floors. The CES trade show has revealed a number of highly automated AI-driven products and gadgets.

For the majority of people, it wasn't long ago that Artificial Intelligence was synonymous with digital personal assistants like Siri and Cortana. AI research was kept largely under the radar, and confined to big technology companies. AI is now a business necessity when it comes to understanding and analysing valuable data. Aside from dealing with data, AI is now used by companies across the spectrum to automate processes, detect fraud, respond to customer queries and carry out menial, but important, administrative tasks. Artificial Intelligence is only improving.

Collaborative Filtering, on the other hand, does not require any information about the items or the users themselves. It recommends items based on users' past behavior. I will elaborate more on Collaborative Filtering in the following paragraphs. As mentioned above, Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a mean of recommendation based on users' past behavior. The key idea behind CF is that similar users share the same interest and that similar items are liked by a user.

When Alexa loses her voice, celebrities--including Rebel Wilson, Cardi B, and Anthony Hopkins--help her get it back. Amazon's Alexa Super Bowl ad was a hit during the big game. With guest spots from Gordon Ramsey, Cardi B, Rebel Wilson, Sir Anthony Hopkins and even founder Jeff Bezos, the ad impres...

If you ask my kids how they search for information on the Internet, they'll look at you like you're from outer space. "Why use the Internet when you can just ask Alexa?!?" Just like that, Generation Z is moving away from Googling what they want to know--and asking AI-powered assistants to find out for them. It's a shift that's been made possible due to huge recent leaps in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), the technology powering conversational devices like Amazon's Echo and Google Home. Perhaps the coolest part: advancements in conversational AI are just now hitting the tip of the iceberg. It may not be long before Generation Z is turning to its bot assistants for talk therapy and dating advice.