Amazon's been expanding its line of smart, Alexa-powered home speakers for awhile now. If you're interested in buying an Amazon Echo, well then today is your lucky day. The smart speaker, which usually is priced at $180, is on sale for just $90 at select retailers today. You can also grab an Amazon Echo Dot for $35, a $15 discount off its regular price of $50, and an Amazon Tap for $80, discounted from the regular price of $130. It's strange that these devices would be on sale at third-party stores and not Amazon itself (not only is the Echo showing as full price, but it's out of stock, with an estimated ship date of August 11.

Facebook has bought artificial intelligence startup Ozlo to help build its Messenger service into a chatty virtual assistant that answers your questions. Ozlo specialises in understanding text-based conversations, and claims its software can understand and answer complex questions that require more than a simple'yes' or'no' answer. For instance, its AI assistant can answer a question about whether or not a restaurant is'group friendly' based on data from multiple reviews. Facebook is buying both Ozlo's technology and workforce, who will likely join Messenger's existing AI team. Facebook has bought artificial intelligence startup Ozlo to help build its Messenger service into a chatty virtual assistant that answers your questions.

Going beyond traditional rules-based voice or chatbot digital banking solutions, a non-bot, natural language banking experience is being offered to USAA members in an Amazon Alexa pilot with Clinc. Last September, a team of computer science professors at the University of Michigan introduced an application developed in their research lab that they believed would change the way consumers would do banking in the future. Combining the science and technology from academia, with the needs for a better voice-first mobile banking capability, Clinc won'Best of Show' honors at Finovate in New York City with their Finie ("the financial genie") application. The intelligent personal assistant uses sophisticated natural language processing engines that have been trained with a deeper knowledge of the financial and banking industry as opposed to using a rules-based approach. Unlike solutions that currently exist from Siri, Alexa and Cortana, Clinc's machine learning capability allows the application to expand knowledge and improve responses with every query.

Guilherme Rambo, who found code suggesting the new photography feature in the leaked HomePod software, also discovered code that references authenticating Apple Pay with facial recognition. Mr Troughton-Smith discovered a'tap to wake' feature, that would allow users to double-tap their screen to wake their device Also earlier this week, Troughton-Smith discovered a'tap to wake' feature, that would allow users to double-tap their screen to wake their device. Mr Rambo tweeted: 'There's also a lot of new references to facial expression detection,' along with the section of the code he was referring to Earlier findings in the code also suggest an infrared camera could be included to allow users to unlock their phone using their face – a feature that was introduced by rival Samsung in its Galaxy S8 device. Apple revealed its HomePod speaker, which rivals Amazon's Echo and Google's Home, earlier this year.

You don't have to dig for old pictures anymore if you're looking at them using Fire TV. Amazon's Prime Photos app now supports Alexa, which means you can bark voice commands at the app instead. To fire up the app on a television, tell your Fire TV Stick "Show my photos." That's only one of the things it can do, though. It can also show files your specify, such as images you added last year ("Show my photos from last year") or ones compiled in an album ("Show my birthday album").

The announcement came after animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) wrote a letter to Tinder founder and chairman Sean Rad to explain why photographs of people posing with the big cats is cruel to the majestic animals. Posted just a day before International Tiger Day on July 29, the Tinder blog referred to PETA's appeal to "rid the platform of tiger photos" and said "we could not agree more." In case you don't understand why posing for photographs with tigers or other big cats -- unless it was taken in the wild and the person being photographed somehow survived -- are cruel, here's another excerpt from the PETA letter: "Baby tigers and other animals used at photo attractions are typically torn away from their distraught mothers when they're just days old and then subjected to extreme stress and physical abuse. There are websites and Instagram accounts, such as tigersoftinder and tinderguyswithtigers, that catalog Tinder profiles that have pictures of people posing with the animals.

Dating app Tinder has called on its users to stop posting pictures of themselves alongside heavily-drugged tigers. The company has said it is time for the selfies to go, claiming they take advantage of'beautiful creatures that have been torn from their natural environment'. It follows calls from animal rights activists to act on the images, which they say appear frequently on Tinder. The pictures'take advantage of beautiful animals that have been torn from their natural environment' Such is their popularity among those looking for love that a number of Instagram accounts have been set up dedicated to sharing screenshots of users who pose with big cats. The company says it will donate $10,000 to a conservation charity if the pictures disappear.

Every good paranoiac sees an always-listening device like an Amazon Echo as a potential spy sitting in plain sight. Now one security researcher has shown exactly how fine the line is between countertop computer and surveillance tool. With just a few minutes of hands-on time, a hacker could turn an Echo into a personal eavesdropping microphone without leaving any physical trace. On Tuesday, British security researcher Mark Barnes detailed a technique anyone can use to install malware on an Amazon Echo, along with his proof-of-concept code that would silently stream audio from the hacked device to his own faraway server. The technique requires gaining physical access to the target Echo, and it works only on devices sold before 2017.

Google welcomed Honeywell into the Home family as a partner back in January, but now it's finally including both of the company's connected thermostat families, the Lyric and Total Connected Comfort. Users can control them using either Home's voice controls or through Google Assistant on an Android device. That adds to the thermostats' existing integrations with connected platforms, including Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings and user-customized IFTTT functionality.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Are you intrigued by the sheer ease with which Facebook tags your friends and family when you post a photo? Or how Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa & Microsoft's Cortana help you find information, give you direction and add events to your calendar? How does Outlook know that some emails should go into your Clutter folder when you never marked them as spam? All these are powered by Artificial Intelligence technologies.