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.

Online news recommender systems aim to address the information explosion of news and make personalized recommendation for users. In general, news language is highly condensed, full of knowledge entities and common sense. However, existing methods are unaware of such external knowledge and cannot fully discover latent knowledge-level connections among news. The recommended results for a user are consequently limited to simple patterns and cannot be extended reasonably. Moreover, news recommendation also faces the challenges of high time-sensitivity of news and dynamic diversity of users' interests. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a deep knowledge-aware network (DKN) that incorporates knowledge graph representation into news recommendation. DKN is a content-based deep recommendation framework for click-through rate prediction. The key component of DKN is a multi-channel and word-entity-aligned knowledge-aware convolutional neural network (KCNN) that fuses semantic-level and knowledge-level representations of news. KCNN treats words and entities as multiple channels, and explicitly keeps their alignment relationship during convolution. In addition, to address users' diverse interests, we also design an attention module in DKN to dynamically aggregate a user's history with respect to current candidate news. Through extensive experiments on a real online news platform, we demonstrate that DKN achieves substantial gains over state-of-the-art deep recommendation models. We also validate the efficacy of the usage of knowledge in DKN.

Bob Baddeley visits The Ben Heck Show team to bring voice control to the Raspberry Pi. Bob and Ben take us through setting up communication between an Amazon Echo Dot and the Raspberry Pi, with Amazon doing the legwork in the cloud. What other interesting projects could this inspire? And what have you made that uses Amazon's Alexa? Let us know over on the element14 Community.

If you want a good barometer of how far Amazon Alexa has come, you just need to look at the company's teaser for its Super Bowl LII ad. Where Amazon's first-ever Super Bowl commercial was eager to sell you on the still-unproven Echo using as much star power as possible, the biggest star (so far) in the teaser is Jeff Bezos -- you know, the company's own CEO. The clip has Bezos giving the tentative go-ahead for a sketchy Alexa replacement after the AI assistant loses her voice. Both the inclusion of Bezos and the very subject of the ad (a national panic caused by the absence of Alexa) show the kind of confidence Amazon has going into 2018. The 2016 ad reflected Alexa's young state.

Amazon announced after the holidays that it had a great season with its Echo devices, but a new report shows the Google Home is catching up. Last month, Amazon said it sold tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices worldwide, selling millions of Echo Dots alone. The Echo Dot, which currently costs $49.99, was the top-selling gadget across all categories on Amazon during the 2017 holiday season. A report released on Friday by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners shows the Google Home had a good holiday too. The report says U.S. customers purchased 31 million Echo units and 14 million Google Home devices in Q4 2017.

By default, both iOS and Android let you access their digital assistants--Siri and Google Assistant, respectively--right from the lock screen (unless the phone owner has disabled the feature). To pull up the assistant on an iPhone other than the X, press and hold the Home button (for the iPhone X, press and hold the Power button instead). On Android, tap and hold in the bottom left corner of the display (where the microphone icon apppears) and then drag your finger up to the middle of the screen. Once you've accessed Siri or Google Assistant, try saying "Call mom," "Call home," or another command that might access one of the phone's owner's contacts. Siri also has a trick that Google Assistant doesn't: Ask "Whose phone is this?" to bring up contact details for the owner.