Technology companies have been saying for years now that it's the era of the smart home. But there have been a few barriers that kept all but the most tech-savvy and patient among us from signing on. But this may be the year to get "smart." The prices of smart home devices are coming down. And companies are focused on making everything simpler to set up.

If you are aware of the developments in technology, then you have probably heard about Artificial Intelligence (AI). For a lot of people, it's too complex or high-tech so they don't really pay a lot of attention to it. In fact, even small businesses don't think much of AI. They believe that only big tech companies like Apple and Google can utilize it. AI has numerous benefits for small businesses.

HPE is adding an AI-based recommendation engine to the InfoSight predictive analytics platform for flash storage, taking another step toward what it calls the autonomous data centre, where systems modify themselves to run more efficiently. The ultimate goal is to simplify and automate infrastructure management in order to cut operation expenses. HPE acquired InfoSight as part of its $1 billion deal earlier this year for Nimble Software, a maker of all-flash and hybrid flash storage products. Along with the announcement of the new recommendation engine, HPE Tuesday also said it is extending InfoSight to work with 3Par high-end storage technology it acquired in 2010. HPE says that is only the beginning of what it is doing to develop InfoSight's ability to monitor infrastructure, predict possible problems and recommend ways to enhance performance.

French startup Snips is now helping you build a custom voice assistant for your device. Snips doesn't use Amazon's Alexa Voice Service or Google Assistant SDK -- the company is building its own voice assistant so that you can embed it on your devices. And the best part is that it doesn't send anything to the cloud as it works offline. If you want to understand how a voice assistant works, you can split it into multiple parts. First, it starts with a wakeword.

Friday marks one of the best days of the year to score a deal on any of those gadgets you've been to buy. Everything from clothes to kitchen appliances will be on sale for the day after Thanksgiving sale. If you're hoping to get a Google product, you shouldn't have to look very hard to find it at the right price. Everything from the Google Pixel 2 to the Google Chromebooks will be on sale for the pre-holiday shopping day. Google home products will be one of the many on sale for Black Friday.

The past few years of technological advances have led us on a collision course – a merging of couture and computing. The industry has reached a point where machines can leverage enormous amounts of online user data from eCommerce, social media, and smartphones to understand and foresee real-life trends, and in return, refresh their products and customise their shopper's experience. Yet, only AI assistants have gone mainstream this far in the industry. While chatbots are great, there are many other customer-centric applications of AI in fashion that remain untapped. Here's how apparel brands can go full-on artificial – and it's way bigger than Manus x Machina at the Met. But can they craft your clothes?

Apple took three years to develop its Siri-powered HomePod smart speaker. According to a new report, the HomePod was originally just a side project at Apple it wasn't really intended to be an Amazon Echo competitor. Sources told Bloomberg that the development of the Apple HomePod began in 2012. At the time, it was merely a side project, which is something that's fairly common within the company. Sources also said that development for the HomePod was canceled and resurrected "several times" because Apple couldn't figure out where it would fit within its current lineup of other products.

We are entering a new era of commerce fueled by younger consumers, mobile devices and high demand for more personalized shopping experiences. Millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce, and their income and buying power are rising. This generation, along with the next tide of digital natives, is putting pressure on enterprises to deliver customer service with the usability and simplicity of consumer apps, and without the inconvenience of phone calls. Companies are investing in artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can provide these experiences through bots, thus ensuring that customers get what they need -- when, how and where they like. Although AI is a solution to customer service problems, intelligent automation is difficult and expensive to develop.

Deep learning has been widely successful in solving complex tasks such as image recognition (ImageNet), speech recognition, machine translation, etc. In the area of personalized recommender systems, deep learning has started showing promising advances in recent years. The key to success of deep learning in personalized recommender systems is its ability to learn distributed representations of users' and items' attributes in low dimensional dense vector space and combine these to recommend relevant items to users. To address scalability, the implementation of a recommendation system at web scale often leverages components from information retrieval systems, such as inverted indexes where a query is constructed from a user's attribute and context, learning to rank techniques. Additionally, it relies on machine learning models to predict the relevance of items, such as collaborative filtering.

It has now become inevitable for Amazon's Echo series to reign supreme in the smart speaker market this holiday season after Apple decided to reschedule the launch of its HomePod device to early next year. This will consequently benefit the manufacturers of the Echo speakers. On Tuesday, DigiTimes disclosed that the delayed release of Apple's HomePod would translate to the domination of the Amazon Echo series in the market during the year-end holidays of 2017. The outlet also learned from a Chinese language report that Amazon has already received its supply of Echo Spot and Echo Show speakers for the holiday season. Amazon's Echo speakers are being manufactured by Foxconn Electronics and Compal Electronics.