I have just had a baby girl. I mean it is probably worth noting my wife played some part in her gestation and delivery, but as a modern progressive couple I'll assume a minimum of 50 percent of the credit. Her arrival has made me consider what the world holds in store for this little female version of me. As I bark at Siri, holding my daughter in the dark, for a "how to" video on baby swaddling, I suddenly feel unsettled. As it becomes second nature to bark orders at the'person in our pocket', does it matter that this person seems to be a she?

Everyone is jumping on AI and its advancements and growth in popularity in the recent years have proved a valuable opportunity for businesses and households. Big industry players have already made strides in research, and some of the largest tech companies in the world have been investing in building their own AI framework, making it accessible not only to enterprises but also independent developers. Large tech companies are harnessing the power of AI as more research developments are making strides in improvement in artificial intelligent technology. The success of its Echo products spurred Amazon to put Alexa into a wider range of devices such as lamps, speakers, clocks, and cars. Earlier in 2017, Amazon launched a smart Wi-Fi speaker that uses voice recognition to not only respond to commands, but also display what it sees.

There's a frequently cited PwC report that says that 38% of U.S. jobs are at risk of being overtaken by artificially intelligent automation by 2030. Similarly, a Scientific American article warned earlier this year that 40% of the top 500 companies will vanish within a decade as they fall victim to artificial intelligence (AI). Let's be honest here, those predictions are pretty easy to dismiss right now. The average person can take a look around and ask, "Where is all of this scary AI?" But AI is already starting to take over in very subtle ways, and there's plenty of evidence that as AI becomes a bigger part of what these companies do it'll eventually become a bigger part of how our world functions.

Have you ever had a great idea for a meme, but didn't feel going to the effort to make it yourself? If the answer is yes, then a new Google Assistant feature may help you out. Called'Meme Buddy,' the feature lets you make meme using your voice. By using the Google Assistant on your phone, you can ask meme buddy to find a photo and give it a caption - or ask it to make a completely random meme for you. To use Meme Buddy, open the Google Assistant on your phone and say'Talk to Meme Buddy.'

In designing personalized ranking algorithms, it is desirable to encourage a high precision at the top of the ranked list. Existing methods either seek a smooth convex surrogate for a non-smooth ranking metric or directly modify updating procedures to encourage top accuracy. In this work we point out that these methods do not scale well to a large-scale setting, and this is partly due to the inaccurate pointwise or pairwise rank estimation. We propose a new framework for personalized ranking. It uses batch-based rank estimators and smooth rank-sensitive loss functions. This new batch learning framework leads to more stable and accurate rank approximations compared to previous work. Moreover, it enables explicit use of parallel computation to speed up training. We conduct empirical evaluation on three item recommendation tasks. Our method shows consistent accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we observe time efficiency advantages when data scale increases.

The autocorrect bug that switched the letter "i" to "A" and a question mark is getting a fix with the release of iOS 11.1.1. Apple released the updated on Thursday, making it the sixth update to iOS 11. iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users can go to Settings General Software Update to download iOS 11.1.1. Apple says the new update "Fixes an issue with keyboard auto-correct" and "Fixes an issue where Hey Siri stops working." The autocorrect bug meant users had a hard time talking in first person with their iOS devices. The issue did not affect everyone, but many people reported the problem on social media.

You'll also get an angled 3.5mm female-to-male adapter for connecting external speakers, and a 10-foot braided USB cable. Mount Genie suggests using power-over-ethernet (PoE) to supply electricity to the Echo Dot. No power supply is included, and you'll need to purchase either a power injector or a PoE switch plus a PoE splitter that you'll install at the Dot end of the ethernet cable (Mount Genie recommends a WiFi Texas model, which Amazon sells for about $21) if you decide to go that route.

The new Amazon Echo is cheaper, smaller and has a less imposing stature, but is it still the best smart speaker going? Amazon's voice assistant Alexa has improved greatly since the Echo's introduction to the UK at the end of last year, altered behind the scenes without users needing to do anything thanks the virtue of being a cloud-powered product. It has gained new skills, routines and other smart home control abilities. Its voice recognition and understanding has improved, and it is now a little more conversational, remembering certain topics that you're talking about the way a human would. But the outside of the speaker has not changed, until now.

A GERMAN man has been left with a huge bill after his Amazon Echo tried to organise a house party while he was away. Hamburg cops were forced to break into Oliver Haberstroh's flat after neighbours complained about deafening music blasting from inside - but found the apartment empty after searching each room for someone to tell off. Mr Haberstroh claims he walked out of his flat to meet friend on Friday night after checking that the lights and music were switched off. He wrote on Facebook: "While I was relaxed and enjoying a beer, Alexa managed on her own, without command and without me using my mobile phone, to switch on at full volume and have her own party in my apartment" "She decided to have it at a very inconvenient time, between 1.50am and 3.00am. My neighbours called the police." After knocking on the door, the officers called an expert to break the lock open - and refused to hand over keys for the replacement until they'd been paid for the locksmith.

Just as electricity transformed the way industries functioned in the past century, artificial intelligence -- the science of programming cognitive abilities into machines -- has the power to substantially change society in the next 100 years. AI is being harnessed to enable such things as home robots, robo-taxis and mental health chatbots to make you feel better. A startup is developing robots with AI that brings them closer to human level intelligence. Already, AI has been embedding itself in daily life -- such as powering the brains of digital assistants Siri and Alexa. It lets consumers shop and search online more accurately and efficiently, among other tasks that people take for granted.