Amazon's Alexa-themed event apparently includes Echo speakers for every possible use case under the Sun. The tech giant has introduced the Echo Spot, a cute circular-screened device that's basically an Echo Show squeezed into an alarm clock. You won't watch movies on it (not with a 2.5-inch display), but it can do many of the things its bigger sibling can -- you can look at a nursery camera, watch a video briefing or hold video calls. The Spot is available to pre-order now, and will ship to the US in December for $130. That's expensive compared to the audio-only Echo, but it's enough of a discount over the Show that it might make more sense if you're not concerned about screen size or audio quality.

Amazon hasn't said anything about it publicly, but today at 1:30PM ET the company is expected to unveil a variety of new products to expand the Echo and Alexa family. The timing makes sense -- with the holidays coming up, having fresh hardware to offer customers is a logical move. And there have been a number of rumors swirling about what we might see lately. Chief among those is new Fire TV hardware that doubles as an Alexa-enabled speaker. Basically, it sounds like a combo of the Fire TV and Echo Dot, which would provide a way to refresh your streaming video box while also adding Alexa functionality to your living room.

FILE - This file photo provided by Amazon shows an Amazon Echo Show on display in a living room setting. With Echo Show, Amazon has given its voice-enabled Echo speaker a touch screen and video-calling capabilities as it competes with Google's efforts at bringing "smarts" to the home. Amazon has been ramping up efforts to get more people to shop using the Alexa voice assistant on Echo speakers and other Amazon devices. It seems rather doubtful that Amazon will bring out its own branded smartphone again anytime soon, as I wrote in this piece yesterday. We all know how the Amazon Fire Phone introduced in 2014 was a high-profile flop, relegated to the scrap heap a year later.

Google has pulled YouTube from Amazon's Echo Show smart speaker. Apparently, Google and Amazon are in some kind of disagreement with the former claiming that the Echo Show is violating their terms of service. For the uninitiated, the Echo Show is one of Amazon's Alexa-powered smart speakers. It's currently the only model that features a touchscreen display and a front-facing camera for video chats. The display on the Echo Show also allows users to watch videos online and even use it as a monitor to view their home security cameras.

The spat is the latest in Silicon Valley in which competitive tensions stood in the way of customers. In a statement, Amazon said, "As of this afternoon, Google has chosen to no longer make YouTube available on Echo Show, without explanation and without notification to customers. There is no technical reason for that decision, which is disappointing and hurts both of our customers." Google, owned by Alphabet Inc, said instead that the development was no surprise. "We've been in negotiations with Amazon for a long time, working towards an agreement that provides great experiences for customers on both platforms," it said in a statement.

Outcomes included the development of symbolic information processing which offered a new paradigm in brain modelling. Rather than pursuing true general intelligence, more companies and researchers are settling for Weak AI programs like Siri, Alexa, Cortana and chatbots. Not all researchers are content to settle for the Weak AI compromise and dedicated purists continue to pursue true AGI. Breakthroughs and developments in Weak AI can be rapid and each receives considerable public attention coupled with further resource investment.

This paper is concerned with the problem of top-$K$ ranking from pairwise comparisons. Given a collection of $n$ items and a few pairwise binary comparisons across them, one wishes to identify the set of $K$ items that receive the highest ranks. To tackle this problem, we adopt the logistic parametric model---the Bradley-Terry-Luce model, where each item is assigned a latent preference score, and where the outcome of each pairwise comparison depends solely on the relative scores of the two items involved. Recent works have made significant progress towards characterizing the performance (e.g. the mean square error for estimating the scores) of several classical methods, including the spectral method and the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). However, where they stand regarding top-$K$ ranking remains unsettled. We demonstrate that under a random sampling model, the spectral method alone, or the regularized MLE alone, is minimax optimal in terms of the sample complexity---the number of paired comparisons needed to ensure exact top-$K$ identification. This is accomplished via optimal control of the entrywise error of the score estimates. We complement our theoretical studies by numerical experiments, confirming that both methods yield low entrywise errors for estimating the underlying scores. Our theory is established based on a novel leave-one-out trick, which proves effective for analyzing both iterative and non-iterative optimization procedures. Along the way, we derive an elementary eigenvector perturbation bound for probability transition matrices, which parallels the Davis-Kahan $\sin\Theta$ theorem for symmetric matrices. This further allows us to close the gap between the $\ell_2$ error upper bound for the spectral method and the minimax lower limit.

Amazon has finally added its chatty personal assistant, Alexa, to its music app. The change isn't simply a feature update but an entirely new way of requesting music from your phone, Amazon said. Now people can ask for specific tracks or artists simply by shouting at their phone. But they can also ask for more complicated things: requesting that the phone play them an automatically generated playlist of "happy 80s pop songs", for instance – which the app will then create. Alexa is already well known for her appearance in Amazon's collection of Echo smart speakers, which can play music simply by shouting at them.

Amazon Tap is envisioned as a portable, Alexa-powered speaker. The list of products, services, and apps that Alexa can communicate with gets larger every day. Alexa is a homebody, which means it's missing out on half the party. Despite Amazon's push to spread its voice-oriented digital assistant to everything from light bulbs to Fords to Fitbits, Alexa's dominance remains inside the company's hit Echo speakers -- and their berth, plugged in at home. These put Amazon in an awkward position: cede the untethered, outside world to rivals, attempt another shot at mobile phones -- a market where it has had a rare, glaring fumble -- or attempt a third way that relies on a bevy of partnerships.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it was reorganizing part of the company to better position itself as one of the significant players in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. The company has created a new organization that combines its research group, one of the largest in the technology industry, and a number of products that rely on artificial intelligence, including its Bing search engine and Cortana virtual assistant. The new artificial intelligence and research group at Microsoft will have more than 5,000 employees. Microsoft also said that one of its top executives, Qi Lu, has left the company to recuperate from a serious bicycling accident that occurred several months ago. Once he recovers, Mr. Lu will continue to act as an adviser to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, and Bill Gates, its co-founder, Mr. Nadella said in an email to company employees Thursday.