Apple is now taking pre-orders for the HomePod, but there is some confusion as to whether services like Spotify and devices the Apple TV can be used with the speaker. The HomePod will cost you $349 and will be available in stores on Feb. 9. The speaker was revealed last June during Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference and was due in December. However, Apple pushed the release date to February instead. The HomePod's price is much higher than other speakers on the market, like the Google Home, Amazon Echo devices and the Sonos One.

Humans have worked with machines for centuries, but the future holds an entirely new phase of human machine partnership characterized by even greater efficiency, unity and possibility than ever before. According to the Institute for the Future (IFTF), we are entering the next era of human machine partnership, Between now and 2030, humans and machines will work in closer concert with each other, thereby transforming our lives. This is evident in our connected cars, homes, business and banking transactions already; even transforming how farmers manage their crops and cattle. Given this great pace of progress, let's take a look at what's coming next in the near future. Prediction 1: We'll journey toward the "mega-cloud" One thing that I would want organisations to realise is that cloud is not a destination, it's an IT model where orchestration, automation and intelligence are embedded deeply into IT Infrastructure.

While we commonly associate recommendation systems with e-commerce, their application extends to any decision-making problem which requires pairing two types of things together. To understand why recommenders don't always work as well as we'd like them to, we set out to build some basic recommendation systems using publicly available data. The first ingredient for building a recommendation system is user interaction data. We experimented with two different datasets, one from Flickr and one from Amazon. The Flickr dataset contains interactions between users and photos that they liked; the Amazon dataset contains user ratings on books.

Apple's HomePod hasn't been released yet, but the competition among voice assistant speakers is fierce. The HomePod, which will be available for pre-order on Jan. 26, will be priced at $349. To compete with the new Apple device, Sonos has reduced the price of its smart speaker Sonos One. A two-pack bundle of the Sonos One will be available for $349, the same price as one HomePod. The Sonos One limited-time deal will be available on Jan. 26, the same day Apple starts taking pre-orders for its own speaker.

For most businesses, machine learning seems close to rocket science, appearing expensive and talent demanding. And, if you're aiming at building another Netflix recommendation system, it really is. But the trend of making everything-as-a-service has affected this sophisticated sphere, too. You can jump-start an ML initiative without much investment, which would be the right move if you are new to data science and just want to grab the low hanging fruit. One of ML's most inspiring stories is the one about a Japanese farmer who decided to sort cucumbers automatically to help his parents with this painstaking operation. Unlike the stories that abound about large enterprises, the guy had neither expertise in machine learning, nor a big budget. But he did manage to get familiar with TensorFlow and employed deep learning to recognize different classes of cucumbers. By using machine-learning cloud services, you can start building your first working models, yielding valuable insights from predictions with a relatively small team.

AI has disrupted the retail industry, and that's a good thing. Consumer behavior is increasingly managed by AI, leading to an unparalleled online shopping experience. AI-powered tools have made it easier for even non-techie CMO's to deliver a highly personalized experience by anticipating consumer needs and making real-time predictions. AI-powered marketing is helping marketers to satisfy increasing customer expectations. It's with the help of artificial intelligence that even small- and mid-scale retailers are able to provide an exceptional one-to-one customer experience like Amazon, Walmart and Nordstrom.

Apple is finally selling the HomePod, its smart speaker. The round, voice-controlled sound system was initially revealed in June and was supposed to go on sale before the end of the year. It wasn't initially clear when Apple would start selling the device, since it only said that pre-orders would open at some point today. But they went live at lunchtime, at the same time in all the countries it will be sold in. It won't actually arrive until next Friday, when it is also expected to appear in Apple Stores, though it's still not clear whether you'll actually be able to listen to it in those stores.

He may be one of the most famous figures in history, but it appears the Google Home smart speaker doesn't know who Jesus is. At least, that's according to several outraged users who have accused Google of deliberately filtering its results to fit its own agenda. They claim that despite not providing any details about Jesus, the smart speaker can still identify Buddha, Muhammad and Satan. When people asked their speaker'Who is Jesus?' the general response from Google Home seems to be'I'm not sure how to help you with that.' One television producer in Nashville compared the theological knowledge of Google Home and Amazon Alexa during a Facebook Live video.

You don't speak Spanish and he doesn't speak English. However, you still communicate with a translator. Not a human being, per se, but earphones paired to your phone. The Google Pixel Buds can translate languages in real time when paired to Pixel 2 phones. Just like Siri can make bookings, Alexa can order groceries and Bixby can set appointments using voice commands.

We started the contest by asking the assistants basic questions about topics like the weather forecast, conversions between different measurements, and trivia. Every assistant could answer a simple query about the weather and provide the forecast for the next few days. We did notice some very slight variations in the responses, probably because these apps rely on different sources. Alexa gave the most useful information in the shortest time, which makes sense--as a voice-only program, it has to be as succinct as possible. They could even update us on the time in different time zones--though we should knock points off for Siri and Cortana, which didn't include the day as well as the time in their spoken responses, something you need to know if a region is a day ahead of or behind you.