We are entering a new era of commerce fueled by younger consumers, mobile devices and high demand for more personalized shopping experiences. Millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, and their income and buying power are rising. This generation, along with the next tide of digital natives, is putting pressure on enterprises to deliver customer service with the usability and simplicity of consumer apps, and without the inconvenience of phone calls. Companies are investing in artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can provide these experiences through bots, thus ensuring that customers get what they need -- when, how and where they like. Although AI is a solution to customer service problems, intelligent automation is difficult and expensive to develop.

Deep learning has been widely successful in solving complex tasks such as image recognition (ImageNet), speech recognition, machine translation, etc. In the area of personalized recommender systems, deep learning has started showing promising advances in recent years. The key to success of deep learning in personalized recommender systems is its ability to learn distributed representations of users' and items' attributes in low dimensional dense vector space and combine these to recommend relevant items to users. To address scalability, the implementation of a recommendation system at web scale often leverages components from information retrieval systems, such as inverted indexes where a query is constructed from a user's attribute and context, learning to rank techniques. Additionally, it relies on machine learning models to predict the relevance of items, such as collaborative filtering.

It has now become inevitable for Amazon's Echo series to reign supreme in the smart speaker market this holiday season after Apple decided to reschedule the launch of its HomePod device to early next year. This will consequently benefit the manufacturers of the Echo speakers. On Tuesday, DigiTimes disclosed that the delayed release of Apple's HomePod would translate to the domination of the Amazon Echo series in the market during the year-end holidays of 2017. The outlet also learned from a Chinese language report that Amazon has already received its supply of Echo Spot and Echo Show speakers for the holiday season. Amazon's Echo speakers are being manufactured by Foxconn Electronics and Compal Electronics.

Have you wondered why it took Apple 3 years to come up with an answer to the Amazon Echo in the form of the HomePod? Apparently, it's because it wasn't really meant as an answer to the Echo. Bloomberg sources claim that work on the HomePod started in 2012 as a side project (common at Apple), and it was reportedly cancelled and resurrected "several times" as the company tried to figure out how a connected speaker would work in its lineup. It reportedly went through multiple dramatic redesigns, including a 3-foot-tall design chock-full of speakers. The company did study the Echo closely when it showed up in 2014, but dismissed its lackluster audio quality and set to working on something that sounded better.

China's e-commerce giant Alibaba has announced plans to invest more than $15 billion over the next three years in researching emerging technologies including artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Jack Ma, Alibaba's executive chairman, announced his decision to establish the Alibaba DAMO Academy (DAMO stands for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum, and Outlook) on the first day of the company's 2017 Computing Conference, which opened on Wednesday. Ma said the academy will do research aimed at "solving problems" related to the Internet of things, fintech, quantum computing, and AI. It will open seven research labs in China, the U.S., Russia, Israel, and Singapore. Chinese tech companies are increasingly looking to invest in cutting-edge research, especially artificial intelligence (see "China's AI Awakening").

Whether it's telling you whether or not you need to take a raincoat on a walk or controlling the lights in your apartment with a simple verbal command, there are plenty of ways that smart speakers such as Amazon Echo or Google Home make our lives a little bit easier. But can they fundamentally improve people's lives? That's the question posed by a trial currently taking place in the U.K., in which a small number of people with learning disabilities are given devices like the Echo to see whether they can help make their lives easier -- and save the care sector some money in the process. The trial gave these devices to five people in Wales for a six-month period. The study will examine whether, during that time, they reduce the need to staff people's homes 24/7, by carrying out caregiver jobs including offering reminders about taking medication, attending appointments, and carrying out some household tasks.

Movie history is filled with computers that make us miserable. Unlike today's computers that make our lives dreadful, like the little ones in our pockets eager to sell out our privacy for a nickel, or crash when we need them most, yesterday's computers were their own character in each film. Everyone knows how rude HAL got at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In The Aries Computer (1972, a mysterious Vincent Price film that may have not been filmed or released, part of the Zodiac series) the reported plot was this: It's 2013 and a supercomputer named Aries has become a ruling force, and humans need to figure out how to take their power back. Later came films like Terminator (1984), with it's hive-mind Skynet keeping humans under its virtual thumb.

General Electronics Corporation on Monday launched voice capabilities for its smart bulbs. The smart bulbs made by the company will now be compatible with the two leading voice assistants -- Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. "Using voice to control lighting unlocks an entire new world of opportunities for consumers. Ask Alexa to dim the lights without getting up. Ask the Google Assistant to turn the lights off once you start to drift off. There are countless possibilities to add additional conveniences at home through these collaborations," Jeff Patton, GM Connected Home Product Management, GE Lighting, said in a press release.

When GE introduced its latest C-series smart light bulbs, the focus was on affordability -- as they talked directly to your phone through Bluetooth, you didn't need a bridge device. That kept them out of touch of voice assistants, however, which meant replacing the whole lot if you wanted hands-free control. Well, you won't have to rethink your investment from now on: GE has introduced a hub, the C-Reach, that puts its bulbs on WiFi to enable support for Amazon's Alexa and (by the end of 2017) Google Assistant. As with most smart lighting kits, you can steer lights individually or in groups just by talking to your phone or a smart speaker. The C-Reach is available on Amazon right now, although whether or not it makes sense depends on what you buy and when.

The anticipation for Apple's upcoming iMac Pro 2017 has just gotten stronger after developers stumbled upon codes that appear to suggest the presence of the "Hey Siri" functionality in the Cupertino giant's new computer. Over the weekend, developers Guilherme Rambo and Steven Troughton-Smith revealed what they found after some digging into Apple's "BridgeOS 2.0" code and macOS. What's very interesting here is that the chip seems to have support for "Hey Siri" functionality. Seems to handle the macOS boot & security process, as expected; iMac Pro lets Apple experiment with tighter control without the rest of the userbase freaking out," Troughton-Smith wrote on Twitter. As per Apple Insider, this could mean that the ARM coprocessor controls the boot process, security and the FaceTime camera. Not only that, the publication said that the inclusion of the A10 Fusion means the iMac Pro is capable of accepting and processing the "Hey Siri" voice command sans the need of clicking the Siri icon or keystroke to activate the voice assistant.