There are few things more infuriating than arriving home to a "Sorry we missed you"card after waiting hours for a delivery. A report last year from IMRG estimated that failed deliveries are costing retailers up to £780m, not to mention the frustration and inconvenience for customers who happen to be in the shower or out when the doorbell rings. It's a problem that the co-founder of Ding, John Nussey, was inspired to do something about. He and his wife, Avril O'Neill, have run their own business for 10 years, making product prototypes for other entrepreneurs, and began to develop their own list of ideas: "Simple, everyday things that had been forgotten about," Nussey says. The doorbell was at the top of that list.

Our favorite affordable smart plug is at a new low price right now (Photo: Reviewed.com) 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. Smart home devices can make everyday tasks easier, leaving more time and energy for other more important aspects of your life. But, they also often carry a hefty price tag.

You can't call 911 on Alexa, but there is an app to call a buddy for help. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. You can't call 911 on Alexa, but there is an app to call a buddy for help.

You can't call 911 on Alexa, but there is an app to call a buddy for help. Say "OK Google, call the police," and you get, "I can't make calls yet." But these are early days for home personal assistants. There are some workarounds for help now, and in the coming years, analysts see the assistants as becoming more useful for emergencies than phones ever were. Amazon currently dominates the market it created.

Samsung is rumored to be making its own smart speaker that will be powered by the Bixby smart assistant. However, it looks like the South Korean company has doubts on the marketability of such a device. "Samsung currently does not view Al speakers as marketable, as the global market is already dominated by unbeatable Amazon and the Korean market is too small to make profits," an anonymous source told The Korea Herald. "More importantly, Samsung cannot afford to focus on the uncertain market, as most of its AI specialists -- whose number is much less than that of the US tech giants -- are currently going all out to develop the Bixby version in English." Samsung might simply be taking a "wait-and-see attitude" towards its ambitions for a smart speaker, mobile industry specialist and researcher Kim Jong-ki suggested.

Samsung Electronics said its Bixby voice assistant for smartphones will start speaking English but only in two countries: South Korea and the U.S. The South Korean tech giant said starting Wednesday, users of the Galaxy S8 smartphones can speak in American English to their phones to turn on the flashlight, take a selfie or make the phone search for say, pictures from a summer vacation, and create an album. Samsung did not say why it could not make Bixby in English available to users outside South Korea or the U.S. or when it will become available in other languages in other countries. The service, comparable to Apple's Siri or Google Assistant, was previously available only in Korean. Samsung says its virtual assistant can be activated by saying "Hi Bixby" to the phone or by clicking a button on the side of the S8 phones. The rollout of the Bixby English version was delayed by a couple of months.

The voice assistant is one of a number of Google products that will provide user data to the curation service that the company is launching Wednesday. The voice assistant is one of a number of Google products that will provide user data to the curation service that the company is launching Wednesday. There's a good chance you're hungry for information you didn't even know you wanted, but Google knows -- and the tech giant is going to spoon-feed it to you. Google is following in Facebook's footsteps, with plans to redesign its popular search page on mobile phones so that you'll get something similar to the social media site's News Feed. Only Google's will just be called "feed."

Updated July 19, 2017, to reflect changes based on Windows 10's Creators Update. There's no doubt about it: Windows 10 is studded with data-tracking tidbits and hooks into all sorts of Microsoft's online services. Handing over all that data has some tangible benefits, like Windows 10's OneDrive integration and the Bing-powered brains behind the Cortana digital assistant, but not everyone is thrilled with the idea of an operating system that's constantly looking over their digital shoulder. I'm here to show you how to get your PC and its data out of the cloud and back on silicona firma. This guide will show you how to disable Windows 10's integration, as well as provide tips on what those features actually do.

Put 2 Echo devices in your cart and Amazon will credit you back $100 right now, effectively pricing each one at $129.99 vs. the typical $179.99 list price. But you'll have to use a special code at checkout, to activate the discount: ECHO2PACK. Amazon Echo is a hands-free speaker you control with your voice. Echo connects to the Alexa Voice Service to play music, provide information, news, sports scores, weather, and more--instantly. All you have to do is ask.

In many personalized recommendation problems available data consists only of positive interactions (implicit feedback) between users and items. This problem is also known as One-Class Collaborative Filtering (OC-CF). Linear models usually achieve state-of-the-art performances on OC-CF problems and many efforts have been devoted to build more expressive and complex representations able to improve the recommendations.Recent analysis show that collaborative filtering (CF) datasets have peculiar characteristics such as high sparsity and a long tailed distribution of the ratings. In this paper we propose a boolean kernel, called Disjunctive kernel, which is less expressive than the linear one but it is able to alleviate the sparsity issue in CF contexts. The embedding of this kernel is composed by all the combinations of a certain arity d of the input variables, and these combined features are semantically interpreted as disjunctions of the input variables. Experiments on several CF datasets show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed kernel. Keywords: Boolean kernel, Kernel methods, Recommender systems, Collaborative filtering, Implicit feedback 1. Introduction Collaborative Filtering (CF) is the de facto approach for making personalized recommendation. CF techniques exploit historical information about the useritem interactions in order to improve future recommendations to users. Useritem interactions can be of two types: explicit or implicit.