Living in New England, it seems like I can never catch a break from high utility bills. If paying your utilities hurts your wallet every month, there are a lot of different ways you can slash those bills down to a more manageable number. For one, smart home technology can help you be more efficient with both heating and cooling, as well as with water and electricity use. Here are 10 smart products that can help reduce your utility bills and put money back in your pocket. Are you forever leaving the living room light on?

You can already use your voice to control your Spotify account with Google Home. The connected speaker also works with Chromecast as a sort of voice-enabled remote control for Netflix. Now Google Home can do the same thing with your CBS All Access and CW TV accounts. Which means, of course, that you can use your voice to watch the upcoming Star Trek Discovery or the latest episode of The Flash with Chromecast built-in. The CBS All Access addition was first spotted by Android Police.

Digital workers classify e-mail queries from consumers, for instance, by content, sentiment and other criteria. But consumers and companies will also expect ever-smarter AI services: digital assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana will have to answer more complex questions. Accordingly, Ms Gray and Siddharth Suri, her collaborator at Microsoft Research, see services such as UpWork and Mechanical Turk as early signs of things to come. The printing press created new work for the wood engravers in Augsburg, but they quickly discovered that it had become much more repetitive.

Silicon Valley is taking steps to make sure mobile apps don't accidentally set users up on dates with Nazis. Racism and hate are not welcome on Tinder. Choose love, respect, and inclusion. In the wake of white supremacists rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, companies like OkCupid are weeding out users who participate in hate groups. "If any OkCupid members come across people involved in hate groups, please report it immediately," the company tweeted.

Six-year-old Jamil starts school on September 11. There will be no ISIS fighters in his first grade class in Ulm, Germany, but Jamil, haunted by nightmares, is still fighting the ISIS demons. The boy's ordeal began in northern Iraq on August 3, 2015. Then four-years-old, he was one of many Yazidis captured by ISIS, crammed into a bus, and taken to Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, then under ISIS control. The Yazidi people are an ancient, non-Muslim religious community regarded by radical Islamists as infidels worthy of death.

If you've been hankering for a chance to play with Google Assistant but don't own an Android phone, Google Home or hate the Allo messaging app, we have good news: Google announced today that the standalone Assistant app has begun rolling out for iOS in the UK, Germany and France, following its US debut back in May. The app lets you converse with Google's AI using your voice, which means you'll likely ask it to answer your questions or use it interact with your smart home devices. Assistant can interact with smart lighting and thermostats, as well as handling calls, sending messages, setting reminders and calendar events, playing music (albeit via YouTube) and directing you home. Google says the app is designed to operate on devices running iOS 9.1 and above, which should cover the majority of iPhone and iPad users. As we noted in our recent Google Home breakdown, Assistant utilises Google's search smarts, so it can help you find what you want faster.

Summary: In our recent article on "5 Types of Recommenders" we failed to mention Indicator-Based Recommenders. These have some unique features and ease of implementation that may be important in your selection of a recommender strategy. A few weeks ago in the midst of our series on recommenders we published an article "5 Types of Recommenders" in which we offered our view on the primary types of recommendation engines. We got a very nice comment from Ted Dunning suggesting that we'd missed an important one, Indicator-Based Recommenders. If you ever get a note from Ted Dunning you should pay attention.

Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. Nucleus is a family communication device that connects you with the people you love, whether they're downstairs or across the country. Make audio and video calls by simply asking Alexa. Designed with the kids and Grandma in mind, making it easier than ever to set up and just say "hello."

Never mind," I cursed, looking down on the poorly formed monstrosity that gazed back at me with a singular pulsing eye. This was not my trusty Google Assistant, with whom I shared a deep logistical and day-planning-based bond. This thing barely looked like the AI to which I was accustomed and -- even then -- only in passing. This alien program appears to have eaten my digital assistant and started wearing its skin -- and I'm about to spend the next week having it organize my life. "Cortana" came to reside in my Nexus 6P via a Google Play Store download, but it soon took over nearly all of the system's support functions.

WHEN the first printed books with illustrations started to appear in the 1470s in the German city of Augsburg, wood engravers rose up in protest. Worried about their jobs, they literally stopped the presses. In fact, their skills turned out to be in higher demand than before: somebody had to illustrate the growing number of books. Fears about the impact of technology on jobs have resurfaced periodically ever since. The latest bout of anxiety concerns the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI).