Two Texas men who were killed earlier this year may have been lured to their deaths by an online dating app used by the pair's killers, investigators said Monday. Harris County sheriff's investigators said the app, which was not named, might have been used to entice Glenser Soliman, 44, and An Vinh Nguyen, 26, The Houston Chronicle reported. Soliman, a nurse at St. Luke's Medical Center, was found dead a few miles from his residence on Feb. 25 after being declared missing on Feb. 16. Nguyen, a student studying hotel and restaurant management at the University of Houston, has not been seen since March 31. Deputies believe the student is dead, but his body has not been found.

Google Home doesn't have a huge range of on-demand music services on offer (Google's services and Spotify are your biggest choices), but you can add one to the list today. Deezer has launched Home support for its streaming music service, giving listeners in several countries a hands-free music source if they're not fans of the larger providers. The stand-out is voice control over Deezer's semi-automatic Flow playlist -- you can tell Home to "play your Flow" and get a highly personalized playlist with very little effort. Not surprisingly, Deezer is catering to its core European audience first: it's starting today with support in France and Germany, while the US, UK, Australia and Canada are due later in 2017. You probably won't rush to sign up for Deezer if you weren't already a member, but look at it this way: few music services outside of the majors work with voice-guided speakers, so this could be a reason to stick to Deezer if you were thinking of jumping ship.

Have you ever felt guilty about leaving your dog home alone, wishing there was a way to calm it? Amazon's Audible may have the answer - a good book. Dog behavior expert Cesar Millan has teamed up with the firm to create audiobooks for dogs, which use human voices to tell stories to dogs when nobody is at home, keeping then company. Dog behavior expert Cesar Millan (pictured) teamed up with audible to conduct their own study to see what impact audiobooks have on dogs when their owners are away. By using a speaker along with one of the audiobooks, users can play one of a range of audible's audiobooks, with recommended titles including: According to a demonstration video by Millan, having to be away from our dogs can be a stressful situation, joined by guilt and shame for having to be away from our pets for long periods of time, for example when going to work.

Online review communities are dynamic as users join and leave, adopt new vocabulary, and adapt to evolving trends. Recent work has shown that recommender systems benefit from explicit consideration of user experience. However, prior work assumes a fixed number of discrete experience levels, whereas in reality users gain experience and mature continuously over time. This paper presents a new model that captures the continuous evolution of user experience, and the resulting language model in reviews and other posts. Our model is unsupervised and combines principles of Geometric Brownian Motion, Brownian Motion, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation to trace a smooth temporal progression of user experience and language model respectively. We develop practical algorithms for estimating the model parameters from data and for inference with our model (e.g., to recommend items). Extensive experiments with five real-world datasets show that our model not only fits data better than discrete-model baselines, but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods for predicting item ratings.

If you want to dip your toe into the world of smart home tech, the easiest place to start is with smart light bulbs. Broadly speaking, they're easy to setup and use, come with enough features to give you a sense of what's possible, and run the range of affordable and simple to expensive and complex. But there are still some questions as to how useful or necessary smart light bulbs are. After all, it's just a light bulb, how revolutionary can they be? Well, I just wrapped up testing a whole bunch of new smart bulbs to find the best right now and learned plenty along the way.

Over the last few years, AI assistants have been on the rise. First, as a fun feature set, now ingrained as part of our daily lives. The personal brand experience, that is, how you interact with technology and brands is rapidly transforming. But will AI assistants and voice platforms rule the space? What do you think about the voice platform?

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are now available to any developer, enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots ("chatbots").

Tom Gruber, a Siri's co-creator who still works at Apple, gave an interesting talk for TED in April in which he discussed how artificial intelligence (AI) could make personal memory enhancement a reality, helping enhance our memory, work and social lives.... Read the rest of this post here "Watch Siri co-creator discussing how AI could make personal memory enhancement a reality" is an article by iDownloadBlog.com. Make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google .

While supercomputer engineers are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the field of computational intelligence, they may also be reinforcing outdated gender norms through the anthropomorphism of their creations. Although they may be driving technological progress, this could be at the expense of socio-cultural progression. Most pertinent is the fact that the world's top supercomputer, IBM Watson, has a man's name and voice while nearly all virtual assistants have female names and voices -- Siri, Alexa, Cortanae. This has most frequently been attributed to a marketing strategy. Jason Mars, CEO of Clinc financial software, told the New York Times that he gave his artificial intelligence (AI) assistant a "helpful, young Caucasian female" voice because, in order to be successful commercially, "there's a kind of pressure to conform to the prejudices of the world."

Chatbots are "computer programs which conduct conversation through auditory or textual methods". Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google Assistant, and Amazon's Alexa are four of the most popular conversational agents today. They can help you get directions, check the scores of sports games, call people in your address book, and can accidently make you order a $170 dollhouse. These products all have auditory interfaces where the agent converses with you through audio messages. In this post, we'll be looking more at chatbots that operate solely on the textual front.