We hope you didn't ask your shiny new Apple Watch about the weather on November 4th -- you probably got a rude response. Many Series 3 owners reported that their wristwear crashed (specifically, the "springboard" interface restarted) if they asked Siri how the weather was that day. It wouldn't crash if they asked about weather in subsequent days, but the odd hiccup affected users across North America and Europe. We've asked Apple for comment. With that said, there's already a potential culprit... and it's a familiar one for iPhone users.

Inc. Echo Spot, from left, Echo, Echo Plus, and Fire TV devices sit on display during the company's product reveal launch event in downtown Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2017. According to a new report, Singapore is on the cusp of the voice technology revolution. Nearly half of the population has tried voice technology services such as Apple's Siri, Samsung's S Voice and Google Assistant, and a quarter of them use such services monthly. With Amazon entering the market this year, the potential for further uptake is high as more advanced products and applications hit the market. Voice technology has been with us for many years now – from automated voice recognition phone systems that failed to understand accents, to simple voice-to-text dictaphones that produced inaccurate copy – but the failings of these systems prevented widespread uptake.

Recommender systems have been widely adopted by electronic commerce and entertainment industries for individualized prediction and recommendation, which benefit consumers and improve business intelligence. In this article, we propose an innovative method, namely the recommendation engine of multilayers (REM), for tensor recommender systems. The proposed method utilizes the structure of a tensor response to integrate information from multiple modes, and creates an additional layer of nested latent factors to accommodate between-subjects dependency. One major advantage is that the proposed method is able to address the "cold-start" issue in the absence of information from new customers, new products or new contexts. Specifically, it provides more effective recommendations through sub-group information. To achieve scalable computation, we develop a new algorithm for the proposed method, which incorporates a maximum block improvement strategy into the cyclic blockwise-coordinate-descent algorithm. In theory, we investigate both algorithmic properties for global and local convergence, along with the asymptotic consistency of estimated parameters. Finally, the proposed method is applied in simulations and IRI marketing data with 116 million observations of product sales. Numerical studies demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing competitors in the literature.

Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming the next transformational technology. Market intelligence firm Tractica forecasts that revenue generated by AI will soar from $1.4 billion in 2016 to $59.8 billion by 2025. What may surprise you even more is how pervasive the technology has become over the last several years. A number of recent advances in AI have already made their way into our daily lives. Here are six ways you may already be interacting with this groundbreaking technology -- without even realizing it.

In an odd turn for retail cooperation, Best Buy is now available on Alexa, Amazon's voice-powered digital assistant. Starting today, you can learn about and order Best Buy's Deal of the Day sales just by saying, "Alexa, talk to Best Buy." Sure, it seems odd to have a competing service on Amazon's own devices, but as the blog post from Best Buy points out, the big box store has been selling Amazon Alexa devices in a special section in about 700 of its stores earlier this year. Best Buy is only the latest retailer to jump on the voice-shopping trend, too. This isn't the first time Amazon has allowed a competitor into its garden, either. Spotify and Pandora live easily next to Amazon's own music service on its connected smart speakers, as do competing on-demand video services.

Digital technologies are creating value and rearranging roles in the travel industry. Here's how industry leaders are profiting from the change. Over the past 20 years, advances in digital technologies have driven numerous innovations and disruptions in the travel industry. These technologies and the companies that offer them have rearranged the industry, leaving some players behind--travel agents, for example--while introducing more complexity into the value chain between travelers and destinations. More recently, mobile technologies have taken center stage as consumer behavior shifts with astonishing speed toward researching and booking travel through smartphones.

One of the most important things I have learned while reporting on AI is that systems built on machine learning may be able to beat humans, or approximate their results, but they can often fail in ways that humans never would, and with unintended consequences. Consider the tale of a Redditor who asked earlier this week whether the Google Home had an internal temperature sensor. He was feeling a bit chilly at home and asked the assistant "What's the temperature inside?" He figured that the system would figure out the temperature from his Nest thermostat and report that back to him. Instead, the Google Assistant went and fetched the weather report for Side, a resort town in Turkey.

Gift-giving season shouldn't be confined to Christmas and birthdays, especially with tech as cool as this. Give your nose a reason to get out of bed with Sensorwake's olfactory alarm clock, which emits aromatic perfume such as Seaside, Peppermint and Toast to start your day on the right note. The HomePod is Apple's answer to the virtual home assistant trend, but the highlight here is the sound quality. Built-in spatial awareness helps the HomePod cater to the acoustics of the room. This one's for the friend who's always asking, "Have you seen my keys?"

Farfield speech recognition has become a popular research area in the past few years, from more research focused activities such as the CHiME Challenges, to the launches of Amazon Echo and Google Home. This talk will describe the research efforts around Google Home. Most multichannel ASR systems commonly separate speech enhancement, including localization, beamforming and postfiltering, from acoustic modeling. In this talk, we will introduce a framework to do multichannel enhancement jointly with acoustic modeling using deep neural networks. Inspired by beamforming, which leverages differences in the fine time structure of the signal at different microphones to filter energy arriving from different directions, we explore modeling the raw time-domain waveform directly.

"We are in an AI revolution," according to James Barratt, documentary filmmaker and author. "AI of course has gone through a number of false springs, but this one seems to have a lot more traction." TechRepublic's Dan Patterson met with Barratt to discuss where artificial intelligence (AI) is headed, and how businesses can take advantage. AI previously was used to enter data, and get back an answer, he said. Now, AI will learn about its users and what they are doing.