Google's new Home Mini voice assistant has been spying on some of its users, due to a "phantom" issue. The device is designed to respond to your questions, but only after you say "Okay Google" or "Hey Google", or tap and hold a touch panel on it. However, an early release model has been found to be recording its owner all the time, without him realising. Android Police's Artem Russakovskii, who received a Google Home Mini at the company's recent Pixel launch event and kept it in his bathroom, reported the extremely serious issue to Google last week. "It was waking up thousands of times a day, recording, then sending those recordings to Google," he said.

The Russian technology company Yandex has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant called "Alice". Yandex, Russia's largest search engine, said in a press release Tuesday that Alice is the first conversational online assistant, possessing "near-human levels of speech." "We wanted Alice to interact with users more like a human, so that users don't need to adapt their requests," said Denis Filippov, head of speech technologies at Yandex. "In developing Alice, we leveraged our speech technologies, which currently provide the world's most accurate Russian language recognition. Based on word error rate (WER) measurements, Alice demonstrates near-human levels of speech recognition accuracy," Filippov added.

Smart speakers might be selling in millions, however, the safety issues with the device persist, especially in the absence of any government restrictions on internet-of-things devices. The recent discovery by Android Police's Artem Russakovskii who was reviewing the Google Home Mini speaker, just before its launch, that the smart speaker had abruptly started recording him 24/7. Google has acknowledged the problem after Russakovskii published his account on Tuesday, but the whole issue exposes the larger issue when it comes to smart speakers. Smart speakers are generally programmed to respond to certain voice commands such as "Ok, Google." Only when such commands are given, do the onboard microphones on the smart speakers start recording the user's response.

Artificial intelligence, the major plot device in countless sci-fi films, is making it big in the entertainment industry. Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping Hollywood get even smarter about how it captures an audience, and the implications for your entertainment are staggering. Do you have an AI strategy -- or hoping to get one? Check out VB Summit on October 23-24 in Berkeley, a high-level, invite-only AI event for business leaders. You've probably seen the terms "artificial intelligence" and "machine learning" used interchangeably.

From the customer's side of things, AI and Machine Learning apps are increasingly present in modern daily life, from new facial and improving voice recognition apps to chatbots and robo-advisors we've become an AI society–perhaps without realizing it. From the business perspective, multiple AI-related innovations are disrupting conventional models across all industries. AI will accompany humans rather than replace them, and help them manage a growing technological complexity. Companies wanting to thrive in the future have had to rethink their strategy by integrating AI as (super) human resources and a capital that redefines the company, its operation model, and its offer. Just within the banking sector, new startups like Plum and Digit primarily help millennials save by making automated microdeposits into savings and investments.

Robert Woods, a pharmacist in Tampa Florida, was charged with sexual battery after he allegedly drugged a woman he met on Tinder. A Florida man who works as a hospital pharmacist was arrested Saturday and charged with sexual battery after he reportedly drugged his Tinder date. According to a police affidavit, Robert Woods, 27, met the woman on the dating app Tinder and the pair agreed to meet at a bar in downtown Tampa, Fox 35 reported. The woman reportedly had one beer at the restaurant before Woods suggested they leave and go to his apartment, where he claimed his friends were having a party. When they arrived, there was reportedly no party.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. Machine learning is everywhere now, from self-driving cars to Siri and Google Translate, to news recommendation systems and, of course, trading. In the investing world, machine learning is at an inflection point. What was bleeding edge is rapidly going mainstream. It's being incorporated into mainstream tools, news recommendation engines, sentiment analysis, stock screeners. And the software frameworks are increasingly commoditized, so you don't need to be a machine learning specialist to make your own models and predictions. If you're an old-school quant investor, you may have been trained in traditional statistics paradigms and want to see if machine learning can improve your models and predictions. If so, then this primer is for you! Even if you're not planning to build your own models, AI tools are proliferating, and investors who use them will want to know the concepts behind them. And machine learning is transforming society with huge investing implications, so investors should know basically how it works. In school, when we studied modeling and forecasting, we were probably studying statistical methods. Those methods were created by geniuses like Pascal, Gauss, and Bernoulli.

Russian search giant Yandex has unveiled its virtual assistant Alice. Like Alexa or Siri, Alice provides users with directions, weather forecasts and news as well as incorporating access to other Yandex offerings like its music service. And, of course, it does all of this in Russian, which Yandex points out isn't an easy language for AI to tackle. "Speech recognition is especially challenging for the Russian language due to its grammatical and morphological complexities," Yandex it said in a statement. "According to word error rate measurements, SpeechKit provides world-best accuracy for spoken Russian recognition, enabling Alice to understand speech with a near human-level accuracy."

Microsoft announced it is rolling its Cortana digital assistant in the Skype app for iOS and Android devices for users in the United States. Cortana will be able to provide assistance by looking up information that's relevant to a user's Skype conversation. "With Cortana's in-context assistance, it's easier to keep your conversations going by having Cortana suggest useful information based on your chat, like restaurant options or movie reviews," The Skype Team said on their blog post. Cortana also suggests smart replies, allowing you to respond to any message quickly and easily--without typing a thing." To start using Cortana on Skype, users will only have to start a chat with one of their friends. They can have a regular conversation all they want and Cortana's suggestions will pop up automatically if it knows it can provide assistance. For example, a user could suggest to his friend that they could watch a movie together. Cortana's suggestion will pop up just beneath that message to provide that movie's IMDB page. Cortana can also provide smart replies along with suggestions, which is a really convenient way of replying to a message without actually typing. Another great thing that Cortana on Skype can do is that it can help users organize their schedule. If Cortana detects that the users are talking about scheduling, it will suggest that they should set up a reminder. When a user creates a reminder with Cortana on Skype, that reminder will also be received to their other devices that have Cortana enabled. This makes sure that users are able to receive their reminders even when they're not using Skype. Lastly, Skype users can actually have one-on-one conversations with Cortana herself. Users will be able to ask Cortana about weather information, sports scores, flight status or suggest the best restaurants that are nearby. The addition of Cortana on Skype is part of Microsoft way of making sure that conversations aren't interrupted. On the company's part, this is also an opportunity to expand the availability of Cortana. "Looking for information often requires interrupting the conversation, even if briefly, and switching apps to find what we're looking for and bring it back into the conversation," The Skype Team said. "But shouldn't technology make our lives easier and truly bring the answers we need to our fingertips?

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