Whether or not virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa actually make our lives better is debatable to say the least. Is navigating the myriad of voice cues really faster or more convenient than just tapping on your smartphone screen a few times? Whichever side of the issue you fall on, it's clear that AI is here to stay, so the European Space Agency is planning to embrace it with a fancy virtual assistant of its own, and it's headed to the International Space Station this year. The new AI is the product of a partnership between Airbus and IBM, and it's called the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion. That's not a terribly catchy name, so they just call it CIMON (pronounced "Simon," I assume) for short, and it'll be put through its paces by astronaut Alexander Gerst.

In the next 10 minutes, you'll possibly be amazed, amused, blown away, frightened, or lost in thought. As this is the beginning of a new year and we'd all rather feel joyful – let's focus on the amusing part. Here are 8 mind-boggling technology acceleration outcomes awaiting for us in the (near) future. Artificial Intelligence (AI) by definition is an artificially created ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. AI could carry out a complete simulation of the human brain and even exceed it.

Some Amazon Alexa users were met with deafening silence Friday, with the voice-controlled digital assistant going down across the U.S. According to Downdetector.com, a website that monitors technology outages and service interruptions, issues with Alexa began after 9:30 a.m. Users reported issues with Alexa's voice recognition service on either Amazon Echo devices or third party electronics that run Alexa, reports The Verge. However, users were able to access the digital assistant through Alexa app, notes TechCrunch. The outage appears to be impacting fewer people than earlier in the day, according to Downdetector.com. However, those with mute virtual assistants have been forced to perform mundane tasks like turn on lights, look up the weather, play music, or call friends the old-fashioned way. How do I turn on my lights now?

Matrix completion method has been used in a wide range of applications such as collaborative filtering for recommendation (Koren et al., 2009), multi-label learning (Cabral et al., 2011) and clustering (Hsieh et al., 2012). In these applications, every entry is modeled as the inner product between factors corresponding to the row and column variables. For example, in movie recommendation, each row factor represents the latent representation of a user and each column factor represents the latent representation of a movie. In many applications of significant interest, besides the partially observed matrix, side information, in the form of features, is also available. These might correspond to demographic information (genders, occupation) for users or product information (genre, director) in a movie recommender system for example. With such features at hand, one can model an observation as a specific linear interaction between features to reduce the model complexity.

Amazon's Echo Spot brings you all the features of its Echo, with a screen for displaying weather forecasts, news updates, sports scores, song lyrics and much more. All you need to do is ask Alexa.

Over the past few months, my team has been working on creating two 5-course specializations on Coursera called "Machine Learning on Google Cloud Platform" and "Advanced Machine Learning on GCP". The full 10-course journey will take you from a strategic overview of why ML matters all the way to building custom sequence models and recommendation engines. These courses provide an interactive, practical, pragmatic way to get started doing ML quickly and effectively. While there are many theoretical machine learning courses, my goal with this specialization is to provide practical training, so that you can hit-the-ground running. In order for you to get that jump start, the courses come with lots of open-source, example TensorFlow applications that you can take and train/deploy immediately.

They may live in our smartphones, but just how "smart" are Siri, Cortana, and other digital voice assistants? Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences used human IQ tests to find out. The results of their study were published this September and ranked the 2016 edition of Google's generically-named "Assistant" at the head of the class with an estimated IQ of 47.28. Baidu's Dumi came in second at 32.92, edging Microsoft's Cortana (31.98). Surprisingly, Apple's Siri trailed the pack with an estimated IQ of just 23.94.

The rise of technology has given way to reliance on virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, for tasks like playing music, setting alarm clocks, and scheduling appointments. Currently, the Airbus company is engineering a similar mission assistant to help astronauts finish everyday tasks on the International Space Station. Airbus is working on the Crew Interactive MObile CompanioN (known as CIMON for short) in partnership with Space Administration at the German Aerospace Center and will be the first time artificial intelligence (AI) is used on the ISS in this way. CIMON is designed as a spherical, free-flying robot that can move independently around the station. It's about the size of a medicine ball, and weighs approximately 11 pounds.

Amazon's Alexa assistant is already capable of performing a wide range of capabilities, but the company wants to push it even further. A new report claims that Amazon wants to turn Alexa into a translator that's capable of not only translating phrases, but also incorporate culturally aware responses. Sources familiar with the matter claim that Amazon is "seriously exploring" the possibility of making Alexa more useful across different languages and cultures, according to Yahoo Finance. One possible way of doing this is by having Alexa translate language in a more sophisticated manner. For example, if a user from the U.S. is only capable of speaking English but he is at an event in Japan, Alexa will be able to help that user hold a conversation in Japanese.

"Alexa, what time is my next train to work?" "There is a 20-minute delay. The next train departs from Berlin Central Station at 9:42 and will arrive at Westkreuz at 9:54." "Alexa, please email Janet and Tim to say: Sorry, my train is delayed. I'll be 10 minutes late for our meeting, can we start at 10:10 a.m.?" Conversational interactions like this one will undoubtedly be part of our future. Tech giants like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are heavily investing in the race to become the leader in voice technology. Voice interactions have been catapulted into the limelight in the past year, but why is this decade-old technology only now becoming a big deal?