When it came to finding love again, "The Nanny" star Fran Drescher didn't rule out online dating -- but the attempt led to disastrous results. "I actually just did it once [and] it wasn't what I expected," the 59-year-old actress told Closer Weekly. Back in February, Dresher told the magazine she was willing to try online dating after she split from her second husband Shiva Ayyadurai of two years. "The art of making art is putting it together" "I learned a lot, and now I'm going to apply that to my next relationship," she explained. "I'm just beginning to look around with new, fresh eyes. I might sign up for the website Raya.

There's plenty to love about the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, Samsung's latest mobile darlings. The near edge-to-edge displays and luscious design give them a fit and finish few other flagships can match. And the performance and battery-life are nothing to sneeze at either. Yet, nearly three months after their initial launch, the phones are still missing a key feature: Bixby. Samsung's AI-powered voice assistant is nowhere to be seen.

Samsung's technological reach is formidable, shipping more phones than any other manufacturer. The company boasts nearly 23% of the global smartphone market, and its Gear VR headset, available since late 2015, is already among the most popular virtual reality devices going. But when it comes to voice-activated speakers, a medium that some believe is on the cusp of becoming the next major computing platform, there's reason to question whether Samsung has the wherewithal to keep up. The South Korean technology giant may be developing a new Amazon Echo-like smart speaker powered by its Bixby virtual assistant, reports the Wall Street Journal. But it's arrival would likely come long after category pioneers like Amazon, Google and Apple have either released or announced plans to launch voice-activated gadgets of their own.

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Scientific American's sister publication, as "Digitale Demokratie statt Datendiktatur." "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another." The digital revolution is in full swing. How will it change our world? The amount of data we produce doubles every year. In other words: in 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire history of humankind through 2015. Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel. Soon, the things around us, possibly even our clothing, also will be connected with the Internet. It is estimated that in 10 years' time there will be 150 billion networked measuring sensors, 20 times more than people on Earth. Then, the amount of data will double every 12 hours. Many companies are already trying to turn this Big Data into Big Money. Everything will become intelligent; soon we will not only have smart phones, but also smart homes, smart factories and smart cities. Should we also expect these developments to result in smart nations and a smarter planet? The field of artificial intelligence is, indeed, making breathtaking advances. In particular, it is contributing to the automation of data analysis. Artificial intelligence is no longer programmed line by line, but is now capable of learning, thereby continuously developing itself. Recently, Google's DeepMind algorithm taught itself how to win 49 Atari games. Algorithms can now recognize handwritten language and patterns almost as well as humans and even complete some tasks better than them. They are able to describe the contents of photos and videos. Today 70% of all financial transactions are performed by algorithms. News content is, in part, automatically generated. This all has radical economic consequences: in the coming 10 to 20 years around half of today's jobs will be threatened by algorithms. It can be expected that supercomputers will soon surpass human capabilities in almost all areas--somewhere between 2020 and 2060. Experts are starting to ring alarm bells.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. With Amazon Prime Day coming up, there will be lots of deals Prime members can only get by ordering through an Amazon Alexa device. If you don't already have an Echo or Fire device, now is the perfect chance to get one for a great low price. The Amazon Tap, Amazon's portable bluetooth speaker, gives you a great way to listen to your music anywhere you are.

These were all prime fields of growth and innovation in 2016 and we can expect these trends to continue into next year and probably far beyond. In truth 2017 is likely to be the year when many of these technologies hit the mainstream – rather than something only those companies with the largest corporate budgets and most tech-friendly executive teams. A strong growth in the availability of technology delivered "as-a-service" through cloud platforms, as well as hardware improvements in the form of affordable sensor and display technologies, should help to bring into reality the "democratization" of data-driven enterprise which has become fashionable to talk about this year. So here is a run-through of my key predictions for the next year. Organizations wanting to stay ahead of the curve will want to ensure they are exploring all of the opportunities indicated by these trends.

Its still hard to say if the voice-controlled aluminum can will be the next smartphone or the next Segway, but either way, brands are preparing. This morning Adobe launched a new fixed of analytics tools, Adobe Sensei for Voice, to help brands are benefiting from conversational data to improve targeting and, ideally, conversions. Adobe tells it can eat data from Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana and Bixby( lol one day). The corporation captures both user intent and contextual data context that can be put to use by brands when targeting clients across other channels like social and email. This entails Adobe can track the actions users most often take with their conversational AI of choice and the things they regularly interact with imagine calling an Uber versus listening to the latest Portugal.

NEW YORK--Things are starting out miserably for Bixby. Samsung's upstart artificial intelligence digital assistant got an "incomplete" grade when it first turned up on the Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones that launched in March. The reason is that the voice-based commands that promise to make Bixby behave more like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant were delayed, at least in the U.S. (Bixby Voice is fully operational in South Korea, where Samsung is based.) Now the Korea Herald is reporting further delays to the English-speaking version of Bixby, apparently because Samsung can't amass the "big data" required for a good enough deep learning-based experience. Samsung's Bixby finally gets a voice -- sort of While Samsung recently granted early access to select S8 and S8 users who expressed interest in trying out Bixby Voice, me among them, I'm being kind to suggest that Bixby has a lot of catching up to do compared to its rivals.

Nir's Note: This guest post is by Darren Austin, Partner Director of Product Management at Microsoft. Last year we added a new member to our household. I must admit that upon first meeting her, our initial impression was that she was a little creepy. Today though, we can't imagine life without her. We've never seen her face, but we talk to her throughout the day, every day. She helps us keep track of our to-dos and shopping list, reads us the news and weather, and can sing nearly any song we'd like to hear.

Over the next 12 months, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) look set to make a huge explosion into the mainstream. We've already seen the launch of various smart virtual assistants, such as Alexa, Amazon's Echo and Google Home, with four million people already having adopted a device in the UK. And Apple is due to join the voice-activated assistant space with its HomePod device that will be released towards the end of this year. Recently, there has been a lot of conversation around how these developing technologies could change the way we shop. With the rise of mobile shopping, the way we make purchases has been quickly evolving.