Burger King pulled a pretty juicy marketing stunt last month that drew plenty of attention - not just to the Whopper, but also to the intrinsic vulnerabilities of a new type of voice-activated gadget. The fast food chain's 15-second television ad targeted Google Home, a speaker that can answer questions and control other smart appliances. When an actor in the ad said "OK, Google" and asked a question about the Whopper, Google Home obediently began reading the burger's ingredients in homes around the country - effectively extending the commercial for however long it took someone to shout "OK, Google, stop!" FILE - In this Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2016, file photo, Google Home, right, sits on display near a Pixel phone following a product event, in San Francisco. Voice assistants such as Google Home, Apple's Siri and Amazon Alexa have always been susceptible to accidental hijack. Burger King's manipulation of Google Home illustrates the vulnerabilities intrinsic to voice assistants that can be targeted by brands, or worse, hackers.

With the advent of Chatbots, personal assistants and robo-advisors, it may not be too hard to imagine that the next wave of technology could revolutionize the traditional style of banking. An Accenture report recently indicated that within the next three years, banks will deploy Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) as their primary method to interact with customers. In early 2016, Swedish-speaking Amelia became the first non-English deployment of IPsoft's AI platform at SEB, one of Sweden's largest bank. The bank adopted "digital employee" Amelia to integrate into its front-office. The cognitive agent solves problems just like humans "but in a fraction of the time", interacts just like humans and even senses emotions.

It was reported last year that Amazon was working on a new Amazon Echo, and a photo, leaked by AFTVnews, seems to show the upcoming device... with a built-in touchscreen. The low-resolution image was found on Amazon's servers and is codenamed "Knight." The device could be launched as soon as this month, according to a CNET report late last month. Read: Amazon Echo Look: An Alexa Powered Camera Device That Works As Your'Style Assistant' Amazon's upcoming device was first reported by The Wall Street Journal last year. The report said the company headed by Jeff Bezos was working on a device that resembled a tablet.

While Tinder users have been analyzing profile pictures of potential dates, a programmer has been stealing them for artificial intelligence experiments focused on facial recognition. Some 40,000 photos were scraped from the dating app, all of users in the San Francisco Bay area, by a member of Kaggle – a platform focused on machine learning that was recently acquired by Google. The data set, named'People of Tinder', consisted of six downloadable zip files and each housed about 10,000 profiles pictures in each. Some 40,000 photos were scrapped from the dating app, all of users in the San Francisco Bay area, by a member of Kaggle. The plan was to use photos in artificial intelligence research focusing on facial recognition.

In the hope of making Alexa as life-like as possible, Amazon has introduced new updates to its AI assistant's voice. Alexa can now whisper, bleep out swear-words, add emphasis to words and even be programmed to say regional-specific phrases. The update has been rolled out to devices in the US, UK, and Germany. Amazon's Alexa can now whisper, bleep out swear-words, add emphasis to words and even be programmed to say regional-specific phrases. The changes are to Amazon's Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) – a standardised markup language that allows developers to control pronunciation, intonation, timing and emotion.

Last week, the dating app Feeld released a bot that, theoretically at least, lets you find out if your coworkers have crushes on you. The way it works is this: Once the bot is installed in the office chat platform Slack, you message the bot with the name of your crush. If they have also messaged the bot with a confession of love for you, the bot will let you know you like each other. The first thing I thought when I read about this was: This is a technology that Laura Linney's character from Love Actually--a nervous turtlenecked mouse who loves her hot coworker Karl silently and obsessively from afar--would use if the movie was set in the modern day. "@karl," she would type into Slack, chewing her nails as she looked at Rodrigo Santoro's bespectacled avatar and hoped beyond hope that the desperate act would deliver her from her unrequited longing.

We often become so obsessed with the portrayal of personal investing as a product or extension of technology that we forget that wealth management is, at its core, a profession rooted in personal relationships. Truly gifted advisors understand wholeheartedly that a client relationship is an ongoing dynamic interaction where the portfolio often is no more than the present tense of multigenerational well-being, purpose and aspiration. Emotions are an integral part of a human existence. When I sit down with clients I seek to understand each facet of their behavioral dynamics, as it is irresponsible (and ultimately ineffective) to recommend and defend a customized wealth strategy without this fulcrum of relevance. Countless studies have depicted the relationships and ambiguities that intertwine emotional stability and financial security.

FILE - In this Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2016, file photo, Google Home, right, sits on display near a Pixel phone following a product event, in San Francisco. Voice assistants such as Google Home, Apple's Siri and Amazon Alexa have always been susceptible to accidental hijack. Burger King's manipulation of Google Home illustrates the vulnerabilities intrinsic to voice assistants that can be targeted by brands, or worse, hackers. But the stunt might help speed up the next developments for home voice assistants: individual voice recognition and even image recognition.

This article originally appeared on the Motley Fool. Match Group (NASDAQ:MTCH) reported first-quarter results on May 2. The parent company of Tinder and Match.com Match Group's board of directors authorized a stock buyback program of up to 6 million shares of Match's stock. Our stock has tended to fluctuate fairly meaningfully, and the buyback authorization enables us to take action if the circumstances warrant. This is not a buyback authorization where we plan to go into the market aggressively.

Alexa-enabled speakers like the Amazon Echo (which is still on sale at its lowest price of 2017) and the Echo Dot are terrific, but they're inherently limited. What happens when you're in a room without an Echo speaker? What happens when you're in the back yard? What happens when you're in the car? What happens when you're anywhere other than the one or two rooms where you keep your Amazon speaker?