For Amazon, hardware has always been a means to an end. From the Kindle e-reader to the Fire tablets to its TV offerings, the company has always treated the space as something of a loss leader – even with its most popular offerings. Amazon has found success in pricing devices much closer to cost than the competition – something a company can only really get away with if it plans to make up for things somewhere down the road, like, say if you're in the content selling business. The Echo line is no different, of course. The goal of the hardware hub is simple: to seed living rooms with its smart assistant and become an essential part of the connected home.

Consumers' desire for personalized shopping experiences is by now well documented. In response to these expectations, merchants are increasingly using tools that present products and content, which reflect shoppers' preferences, and past picks. These investments are likely to pay off, as merchants report personalization improves results throughout the customer life cycle. Product recommendation and customer profiling tools increasingly integrate past brand interactions with "big data" insights that predict shoppers' likely needs and paths to purchase. Artificial intelligence, known as AI, is the logical next step in this progression, enabling machines to respond to shoppers' input with relevant content and products.

Amy Ingram, the artificial intelligence personal assistant from startup X.ai, sounds remarkably like a real person. The company designed her to take on the mundane tasks of scheduling meetings and e-mailing about appointments. If a bot had access to your calendar and was cc-ed on correspondence, why couldn't it do the work for you? After she made her debut in 2014, users praised her "humanlike tone" and "eloquent manners." But what most people don't realize about this artificial intelligence is that it isn't totally artificial: Behind almost every e-mail is an actual human--someone like 24-year-old Willie Calvin. Calvin, who worked as an AI trainer for X.ai before he said he quit in October, was part of the reason Amy never tripped up, sending the sort of blind response that reveals she's a bot.

What do you think when someone says'artificial intelligence'? Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way from concept to reality in a short space of time and, despite being a buzzword for the last couple of years, is now mainstream enough that all the main tech players are developing their own products and services to help us through our daily lives. Google has recently developed a context-aware personal assistant simply called the Google Assistant, which can engage in two-way conversations with the user and help with everything from turning the lights on, to playing the latest tunes from Spotify, all without touching a button. Facebook, on the other hand, has taken the different approach of implementing smart chatbots into their Messenger app to make it easier and more convenient for users to check things like the weather and the news, without having to leave the app they're using for conversations. The potential of AI is finally starting to be realised - although there is a long way still to go.

Apple's Phil Schiller just shared his honest thoughts about the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers. He also indirectly pointed out what he thinks is lacking in these devices. Gadgets 360 has finally published its interview with Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing when he was in Bengaluru, India last March. When Schiller was asked to comment on the famous smart speakers Amazon Echo and Google Home, he responded that he won't give specific comments on each device. He then candidly added, "My mother used to have a saying that if you don't have something nice to say, say nothing at all." Schiller continued by saying that he'll just tackle the general concepts.

Current recommender systems exploit user and item similarities by collaborative filtering. Some advanced methods also consider the temporal evolution of item ratings as a global background process. However, all prior methods disregard the individual evolution of a user's experience level and how this is expressed in the user's writing in a review community. In this paper, we model the joint evolution of user experience, interest in specific item facets, writing style, and rating behavior. This way we can generate individual recommendations that take into account the user's maturity level (e.g., recommending art movies rather than blockbusters for a cinematography expert). As only item ratings and review texts are observables, we capture the user's experience and interests in a latent model learned from her reviews, vocabulary and writing style. We develop a generative HMM-LDA model to trace user evolution, where the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) traces her latent experience progressing over time -- with solely user reviews and ratings as observables over time. The facets of a user's interest are drawn from a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model derived from her reviews, as a function of her (again latent) experience level. In experiments with five real-world datasets, we show that our model improves the rating prediction over state-of-the-art baselines, by a substantial margin. We also show, in a use-case study, that our model performs well in the assessment of user experience levels.

Inventec has reportedly scored a deal to build Apple's Amazon Echo-like Siri speaker device. Apple hasn't confirmed its personal assistant appliance is a real thing yet, but evidence keeps surfacing that seems to support it's on the way. The latest report comes via Taiwan's Economic Daily News. According to their supply chain sources, Inventec is either assembling components or building the entire device. The company builds Apple's AirPods, so a working relationship is already in place.

After its stock price reached a record high in Hong Kong earlier this week, Chinese internet giant Tencent, now valued at more than $300 billion, made the list of the 10 most-valuable companies in the world. The company is best known for its popular social messaging platform WeChat, mobile payment solutions and fast-growing mobile gaming segment. During Tencent's 2016 annual results announcement, management reiterated "Connection" as its strategy for 2017--which means WeChat will remain at the core of Tencent's business development strategy, and with good justification. Within just six years, the social messaging platform has grown to become one of the largest communication platforms in the world, rivaling other popular apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The core value of WeChat is in the conversation data generated by the enormous user base, which Tencent monetizes through advertisements and additional offerings such as mobile games and payments.

He enrolled in the NYC Data Science Academy 12-week full time Data Science Bootcamp program taking place between July 5th to September 23rd, 2016. This post is based on their third project - Web Scraping, due on 6th week of the program. The original article can be found here. The average American spends 4 hours a day listening to music (SPIN) and 93% of Americans listen to music daily in some capacity (EDISON). Almost half of that listening is via AM/FM radio, but music streaming services are gaining a greater and greater market share and have even turned around the declining revenues of the music industry.

Alexa is poised for a major breakout. Over the past few months, Amazon's AI assistant has expanded to the iPhone in the Amazon app, Android with the Huawei Mate 9, and gotten a camera upgrade with the fashion-minded Echo Look. But a new leak suggests Amazon has even bigger plans for Alexa. And by bigger, we mean bigger. A leaked photo first published on AFTV News (followed up with a higher-resolution one tweeted by Android leakster extraordinaire Evan Blass) shows a pretty massive new form factor for Echo.