Sonos has multi-room audio down to a science, but it desperately needed a speaker capable of voice recognition if it was to fend off the veritable flood of smart speakers coming to market. The Sonos One is that speaker. It sounds better than the last entry-level Sonos speaker, it's compatible with Amazon's Alexa digital assistant, and it will be compatible with Google Assistant soon. If you already have Sonos speakers in other rooms, you can control all of them with voice commands with the addition of a single Sonos One to your network. And once you have that, you can control any Sonos speaker from any Amazon Echo.

In my house, we use it to play radio stations, to get the weather, and to answer questions like "When was the Edo period?" One thing I don't often use the Echo for is music. That's because it sounds terrible. As good as Amazon's Alexa voice service is, the Echo's black tin can croaks out audio just a notch better than the 20-year-old Coby FM radio I keep in the garage. Amazon has taken steps to improve the Echo's sound quality with a reboot last month, and companies like Lenovo have coaxed Alexa into nicer-sounding enclosures.

When Sonos released the Play:5 speaker in late 2015, the Amazon Echo was still an unproven tech curiosity. But since then, Alexa and the Echo have grown rapidly in both popularity and functionality, inspiring competition from the likes of Google and Apple. Talking to a speaker is totally normal now -- but Sonos users haven't been able to that. They've instead had to choose between the convenience of products like the Echo and Google Home and the superior audio quality that Sonos speakers offer. Sonos has known for some time that this is a problem.

Your voice is measured by frequency, the wavelengths of sound at a specific moment. When you speak to Alexa, the software breaks down your command into 25-millisecond slivers, then converts each wavelength measurement into digestible numbers. The software compares those sonic signatures to its catalog of sounds until its confidence scores are high enough that it can assume that you said, "Order more dog food." Watch your phone screen while using Siri or Google Assistant, and you'll see the transcription swap out words as you speak. That's the software comparing the words it thinks you've said to its stores of example sentences, which inform how it understands syntax and vocabulary.

From The Terminator to Blade Runner, pop culture has always leaned towards a chilling depiction of artificial intelligence (AI) and our future with AI at the helm. Recent headlines about Facebook panicking because their AI bots developed a language of their own have us hitting the alarm button once again. Should we really feel unsettled with an AI future? News flash: that future is here. If you ask Siri, the helpful assistant who magically lives inside your phone, to read text messages and emails to you, find the nearest pizza place or call your mother for you, then you've made AI a part of your everyday life.

Alphabet Inc., Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and others are hunting for new areas of growth--often on each other's turf--as they enjoy soaring revenues and stock prices. They are poised to bump into each other across the board, in online sports viewing, movies, news and even podcasting. Up for grabs is an extra $300 billion a year in revenues that Activate projects will flow into the $1.7 trillion global consumer media and internet market by 2021, through growing internet-access fees, ads and paid content. Activate estimates the market will grow 4.1% a year. Consumers' time, though, is already stretched, with young people in particular tethered to devices much of the day.

Google will sell its new Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL devices at pop-up stores starting Oct. 19, the company announced. Since Google doesn't have hardware stores like Apple, Google will instead open up temporary locations to sell its newest smartphones and "all things made by Google," the search engine company said on Twitter using the hashtag #googlepopup. Where Are The Google Pop-Up Stores? Google will open up two location in the U.S., one in New York City and one in Los Angeles. The New York pop-up store will be located at 110 Fifth avenue in Manhattan, while the California shop will be located at 8552 Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood.

You can already use a Google Home speaker to control regular YouTube videos if you have a Chromecast device, but what about YouTube TV? You're set from now on. Google has enabled voice control over its cord-cutting television service from Home speakers, making it possible to change channels without touching your remote. You can ask Google Assistant to play a specific channel or show, and it's smart enough to recognize fuzzier requests. Tell it to "play the MLB game" and it'll switch to baseball without needing a specific channel or team, for instance. Of course, this is only useful if you live in one of the major US cities where YouTube TV is available.

Recommender systems are automated computer programs that match items to users in different contexts. Such systems are ubiquitous and have become an integral part of our daily lives. Examples include recommending products to users on a site like Amazon, recommending content to users visiting a website like Yahoo!, recommending movies to users on a site like Netflix, recommending jobs to users on LinkedIn, and so on. Given the significant heterogeneity in user preferences, providing personalized recommendations is key to the success of such systems. To achieve this goal at scale, using machine learning models to estimate user preference from feedback data is essential.

PEOPLE often marry people who are just like them – similar in terms of social background, world view and race. Online dating may be changing that, however, breaking us out of our existing social circles. Economists Josué Ortega at the University of Essex, UK, and Philipp Hergovich at the University of Vienna, Austria, suggest it could even lead to more integrated societies. Before the first dating websites appeared in the 1990s, most people would meet dates through existing networks of friends or colleagues. But the rise of dating sites like Match.com and apps like Tinder has made online dating the norm for many.