We're hurtling toward the holiday shopping season, which means companies are putting the finishing touches on their gadgets and getting them ready for the impending crush of consumerism. This week, we met a bundle of new Alexa-based products from Amazon, and Spotify sent everyone on your friends list into a full-on nostalgia bender. Here's what you might have missed last week. Amazon gave the Echo smart speaker lineup a near-total refresh last week. Taking the place of the old $179 Echo are two new devices: an adorably small $99 Echo speaker, and a $150 Echo Plus--which has bigger speakers and more advanced smart home controls.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used more and more in devices including virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa.

Nearly one year ago, Google declared that it was getting serious about designing its own gadgets by launching the Google Pixel and Google Home. This week, we'll finally see what the next generation of those devices looks like. The search giant is holding an event on October 4 where it will presumably unveil a new version of the Pixel, another voice-activated smart speaker, and other product updates. Here's a rundown of what to expect. This will likely be the biggest announcement Google makes on October 4. Google is reportedly planning to announce two new Pixel phones, one of which may come with a 5-inch screen and another with a larger 6-inch display, according to a post on developer forum XDA.

A few months ago, Bumble announced that it would be adding business networking features to its dating app. Now it's here, and it's called Bizz. It launches in the US, UK, Germany, France and Canada today. Bumble's claim to fame in the crowded dating app market is that it allows women to choose who they want to talk to; men must wait to be contacted. It's a measure that's also integrated into Bizz.

Building on its long history of powering virtual assistants for many of the leading consumer and automotive brands in the world, including American Airlines, Amtrak, Audi, Barclay's, BMW, Citi, Delta, Domino's, FedEx, Ford, and GM, Nuance Communications, Inc. today unveiled its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered virtual assistant solution designed specifically for healthcare providers. Leveraging its extensive experience in healthcare, Nuance's new Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant will further streamline a wide variety of clinical workflows for the 500,000 clinicians that already rely on Dragon Medical every day for their clinical documentation. Based upon the award-winning Nuance Virtual Assistant platform, the Dragon Medical Virtual Assistant will deliver sophisticated conversational dialogues and pre-built capabilities that automate high-value clinical workflows. This solution directly addresses the belief by 80% of 10,000 U.S. clinicians surveyed by Nuance that virtual assistants would drastically change healthcare by the end of 2018. "Technology needs to be unobtrusive and support the process of providing high quality patient care--not get in the way," said David Y. Ting, MD, CMIO, Massachusetts General Physicians Organization.

For decades, we have listened to a one-way radio to get our daily dose of news and music. Spotify came along and redefined the whole experience of consuming music. And now, we, at CityFALCON, are changing your consumption experience for news. Get started by activating our skill for English-US or English-UK on your Echo. You could create new watchlists, add topics to follow (from stocks, commodities, foreign exchange, indices, cryptocurrencies, and more), and identify opportunities through trending topics.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they have started using intelligent virtual agent for Microsoft Support customer care in the US. At Ignite conference this week, Microsoft revealed that their virtual agent is now handling over 650,000 sessions per week, also it is increasing both customer and support agent satisfactions. Microsoft is now opening up this technology to other organisations through Dynamics 365 AI solutions. HP Inc. and Macy's are now trying out this solution for their respective customer care effort through Early Access Program. "HP is reinventing the support experience by empowering our customers to easily solve a broad range of issues on their own," said Jon Flaxman, Chief Operating Officer, HP Inc. "Microsoft's advanced Artificial Intelligence capabilities enables HP Customer Service to deliver and manage these self-service solutions efficiently and with more precision." You can learn more about the new Dynamics 365 AI solutions here.

Scrolling through dating websites a year ago, Indonesian app developer Lindu Pranayama realised there were a lot of married men looking for another wife - but few online services to meet their needs. "When they go to regular dating sites, they don't see options for polygamy. They don't see options for finding second, third or fourth wives," he said. Enter "AyoPoligami" - a new smartphone app developed by Pranayama, which aims to "bring together male users with women who are willing to make'big families'." Loosely translated as "Let's do polygamy", the Tinder-style dating app has already stirred up controversy since its April launch in Indonesia, where over 80 percent of the 250 million population are Muslim and polygamy is legal.

Upon visiting Berlin's IFA2107 -- Germany's answer to CES -- recently, there was one word I kept hearing: Alexa. In the consumer hardware space, it's a great time to be Amazon, if the sheer number of hardware companies jumping on the Alexa bandwagon are anything to go by. Only today it was revealed that Amazon is working on a pair of smart glasses integrating Alexa, intended to look similar to regular glasses with bone conduction technology to allow the user to engage with Alexa without having to wear headphones. Amazon is also working on an Echo connected camera system that cannot only keep a look out for intruders but also Amazon-delivered packages. During the IFA conference, a number of companies made their own Alexa announcements.

Theory of Mind is the ability to attribute mental states (beliefs, intents, knowledge, perspectives, etc.) to others and recognize that these mental states may differ from one's own. Theory of Mind is critical to effective communication and to teams demonstrating higher collective performance. To effectively leverage the progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make our lives more productive, it is important for humans and AI to work well together in a team. Traditionally, there has been much emphasis on research to make AI more accurate, and (to a lesser extent) on having it better understand human intentions, tendencies, beliefs, and contexts. The latter involves making AI more human-like and having it develop a theory of our minds. In this work, we argue that for human-AI teams to be effective, humans must also develop a theory of AI's mind (ToAIM) - get to know its strengths, weaknesses, beliefs, and quirks. We instantiate these ideas within the domain of Visual Question Answering (VQA). We find that using just a few examples (50), lay people can be trained to better predict responses and oncoming failures of a complex VQA model. We further evaluate the role existing explanation (or interpretability) modalities play in helping humans build ToAIM. Explainable AI has received considerable scientific and popular attention in recent times. Surprisingly, we find that having access to the model's internal states - its confidence in its top-k predictions, explicit or implicit attention maps which highlight regions in the image (and words in the question) the model is looking at (and listening to) while answering a question about an image - do not help people better predict its behavior.