The new Amazon Echo is cheaper, smaller and has a less imposing stature, but is it still the best smart speaker going? Amazon's voice assistant Alexa has improved greatly since the Echo's introduction to the UK at the end of last year, altered behind the scenes without users needing to do anything thanks the virtue of being a cloud-powered product. It has gained new skills, routines and other smart home control abilities. Its voice recognition and understanding has improved, and it is now a little more conversational, remembering certain topics that you're talking about the way a human would. But the outside of the speaker has not changed, until now.

A GERMAN man has been left with a huge bill after his Amazon Echo tried to organise a house party while he was away. Hamburg cops were forced to break into Oliver Haberstroh's flat after neighbours complained about deafening music blasting from inside - but found the apartment empty after searching each room for someone to tell off. Mr Haberstroh claims he walked out of his flat to meet friend on Friday night after checking that the lights and music were switched off. He wrote on Facebook: "While I was relaxed and enjoying a beer, Alexa managed on her own, without command and without me using my mobile phone, to switch on at full volume and have her own party in my apartment" "She decided to have it at a very inconvenient time, between 1.50am and 3.00am. My neighbours called the police." After knocking on the door, the officers called an expert to break the lock open - and refused to hand over keys for the replacement until they'd been paid for the locksmith.

Just as electricity transformed the way industries functioned in the past century, artificial intelligence -- the science of programming cognitive abilities into machines -- has the power to substantially change society in the next 100 years. AI is being harnessed to enable such things as home robots, robo-taxis and mental health chatbots to make you feel better. A startup is developing robots with AI that brings them closer to human level intelligence. Already, AI has been embedding itself in daily life -- such as powering the brains of digital assistants Siri and Alexa. It lets consumers shop and search online more accurately and efficiently, among other tasks that people take for granted.

Amazon's Echo, Plus and Dot speakers will finally be available in Japan starting next week. To prepare for the devices' arrival in the island nation, the e-retail giant taught the voice assistant how to understand and respond in the Japanese language. Alexa SVP Tom Taylor said the company designed an all-new experience "from the ground up for Japanese customers, including a new Japanese voice, local knowledge and over 250 skills from Japanese developers." Users in the country can issue typical Alexa voice commands in their native tongue. They can, say, listen to news from Japanese media companies like NHK, TBS TV, TV TOKYO, Asahi Newspaper and Mainichi Newspaper.

How often has any piece of consumer technology had as eventful a year as 2017 has been for Amazon's Alexa voice service and Echo hardware? Consider the evidence: A year ago, Amazon boasted that there were 4,000 Alexa skills–tasks the service can perform, from setting a Nest thermostat to playing Jeopardy–up from 135 the previous January. Today, the count stands at 25,000. Alexa can now make phone and video calls, distinguish between the voices of multiple household members, and display information on screens, none of which it was able to do when the year began. In August, Amazon and Microsoft even announced that Alexa and Cortana would be able to talk to each other, a first-of-its-kind arrangement in the voice-assistant market.

Recommender systems problems witness a growing interest for finding better learning algorithms for personalized information. Matrix factorization that estimates the user liking for an item by taking an inner product on the latent features of users and item have been widely studied owing to its better accuracy and scalability. However, it is possible that the mapping between the latent features learned from these and the original features contains rather complex nonlinear hierarchical information, that classical linear matrix factorization can not capture. In this paper, we aim to propose a novel multilayer non-linear approach to a variant of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) to learn such factors from the incomplete ratings matrix. Firstly, we construct a user-item matrix with explicit ratings, secondly we learn latent factors for representations of users and items from the designed nonlinear multi-layer approach. Further, the architecture is built with different nonlinearities using adaptive gradient optimizer to better learn the latent factors in this space. We show that by doing so, our model is able to learn low-dimensional representations that are better suited for recommender systems on several benchmark datasets.

If you have a Sony TV in your living room, it just got a little smarter. Sony is rolling out an update to many of its Android TV-powered 4K HDR sets (more on that in a moment) to enable Google Assistant. Talk to your remote and you'll get the same AI helper that you can likely find on your phone. Naturally, Assistant can do a little more than you're used to on your phone: you can ask about the weather, search for factoids or play videos, but you can also control your TV. Sony is particularly keen to tout the'seamless' smart home control -- you should have an easier time dimming the lights when it's movie time.

Suddenly, artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. For decades, the dream of creating machines that can think and learn like humans seemed like it would be perpetually out of reach, but now artificial intelligence is embedded in the phones we carry everywhere, the websites we use every day and, in some cases, even in the appliances we use around our homes. The market researchers at IDC have predicted that companies will spend $12.5 billion on cognitive and AI systems in 2017, 59.3% more than they spent last year. And by 2020, total AI revenues could top $46 billion. In many cases, AI has crept into our lives and our work without us realizing it.

R2-D2 may seem like a blast to hang out with, but in real-life, robots are rarely social butterflies. They're fantastic assembly line workers, bolting together cars and refrigerators, but most are all work and no play. The closest thing to robotic friends we have right now are the growing number of smart speakers, like the Amazon Echo, each with an voice assistant inside them. Smart speakers have carved out a few uses, like playing music, cracking jokes, telling us the weather, and controlling our smart home devices. Which is why I was excited to meet Jibo.

As IoT branches out over the next few years, transforming the way consumers live, work, and think, we will enter the age of ubiquitous computing. By 2025, there will be more than 100 billion connected devices – that's 14 for every person on the planet – generating a revenue of almost $10 trillion. The scale of data creation in this environment is too vast to imagine. But there's no escaping data, and finding new ways to analyze and harness all this information will be just as critical as it is challenging. Enter artificial intelligence: Our key to unlocking never-before-seen opportunities in data and spending less time driving these insights into action. During the mobile era, devices became a distraction.