You can save $30 when you bring Alexa home through May 13. (Photo: Amazon) If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from any business incentives. If you've been toying with the idea of trying out smart home technology, this is the perfect opportunity. The Amazon Echo is one of the top smart home devices on the market whether you're just starting out or you've already starting living the smart home life. Amazon rarely drops the price of their flagship voice assistant, but right now the Echo is $30 off and will remain on sale until May 13. When I got mine last year, I was unsure I'd even want to use it.

Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos owes a thank you to consumers between the ages of 17 and 36 for the incredible lead its Echo device has in the voice-enabled speaker market. While using devices like the Echo or Apple's (AAPL) voice assistant Siri is still not the norm in the U.S. in 2017, their popularity is growing, according to a new study from eMarketer. When looking specifically at voice-enabled speakers that can provide everyday help by telling you the weather forecast or the day's top headlines, Amazon's Echo claims 70.6% of the market, followed by Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google Home, which claims just 23.8% of the market. The remaining 5.6% of the pie is shared by smaller players, such as Lenovo, LG, Harmon Kardon, and Mattel. Apple and Alphabet are holdings in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio.

Microsoft is finally giving Cortana its own hardware home. Okay, it's not Microsoft exactly, but Harman Kardon's Invoke, announced Monday and coming this fall, is the first stand-alone hardware devoted to the Microsoft's chatty AI. And it looks like Amazon Echo's conical cousin, right down to the volume dial on top. Like the Echo, Harman Kardon's Invoke is a speaker, but owing to Harman's audiophile roots, it raises the aural ante, including three woofers and three tweeters. The combination provides what Harmon calls 360-degree sound.

Harman Kardon's Invoke speaker, the Microsoft Cortana-powered answer to the Google Home and Amazon Echo, will ship this fall according to a preview page with the first official images of the tabletop device. Though pricing hasn't yet been revealed, Harman Kardon said that the Invoke will perform three major tasks: make and receive calls with Skype, control popular music services like Microsoft Groove, and "get things done" with Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant. Microsoft said it would team up last year with Harman Kardon as part of a new Internet of Things initiative powered by Cortana. Though the initial partnership was expected inside connected cars, it appears both companies will leap into homes first. Harman was showing off the new Invoke on a preview page on its website that's since be unpublished, inviting potential buyers to sign up.

It appears a lot more Americans are getting acquainted with Alexa. The Echo is the best way to add Alexa to your life, and you can get access to all sorts of Alexa-exclusive deals once you have one. The number of Americans using voice-enabled speakers like Amazon Echo at least once a month more than doubled from last year, says a forecast from research firm eMarketer. More than one-quarter of smartphone owners in the U.S., 60.5 million Americans, will use a virtual assistant like Alexa, Apple's Siri, or Microsoft's Cortana at least once a month. "Consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with the technology, which is driving engagement," said Martín Utreras, eMarketer's vice president of forecasting, in a statement.

If last year was all about the rise of Alexa and Google Assistant, 2017 might be when Cortana and Siri have time to shine. Apple is reportedly due to launch its oft-rumored connected speaker at its WWDC conference next month, but Microsoft has been quite open about its plan to expand its AI assistant beyond mobile and the desktop. In December, it teamed up with audio specialist Harman Kardon to begin building the first in a wider line of connected speakers. However, details have been scarce. Now, thanks to a (now pulled) landing page on the Samsung-owned company's website, we have a name -- Invoke -- and a better understanding of what it will offer.

Project 1: Movie Recommendations For this project, you'll receive provide data about movies and users which will be used to train the model and generate recommendations for users about which movies they would like to watch, using the collaborative filtering technique. The data set for this project contains information on customers who received a Home Equity Line of Credit. The target variable is a flag. If the value is a "1" then the person defaulted on the loan. If the value is a "0" then the person repaid the loan.

You can pick up Amazon Echo for $30 below list price right now with this rare deal from Amazon. 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. Echo has seven microphones and beam forming technology so it can hear you from across the room--even while music is playing.

Let's pause for a moment, and take linguistic stock. Technology has many societal impacts, but perhaps one of its most visibly evident is how the tools we use change how we communicate with each other -- so, literally, how technology rewrites language itself. We see this in the willing stockpiling of techie jargon into individual vocabularies (the Androids, the iPhones, the lesser-seen Surface Books); the new word coinages (blockchain), the new and expanding uses for existing words (a'message' is a noun; 'message me' an imperative verb asking someone to send you an IM); the creative portmanteaus (glasshole is a particularly good one), the tech-obsessed idioms (I don't have bandwidth for that right now), and so on and on. We also get to glimpse the places where technology might be in the process of placing stress on social structures or societal norms. Again, glasshole is a great example of that -- a word that effectively contains the full story of Google Glass' abject consumer failure wrapped up in those two mocking syllables.

Remember the famous scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey, when Hal 9000--the intelligent-turned-malevolent computer--regresses to his "childhood" and sings "Daisy Bell" as he's decommissioned by astronaut Dave Bowman? Its inspiration was a real-life Bell Labs demonstration of speech synthesis on an IBM 704 mainframe in 1961, witnessed by Arthur C Clarke, who later incorporated it into his 2001 novel and screenplay. Although Bell Labs' involvement in the field stretches back to the 1930s with Homer Dudley's keyboard-and-footpedal-driven Voder speech synthesis device, it's undoubtedly the classic Kubrick/Clarke movie that cemented the ideas of artificial intelligence (AI) and conversing with computers into the public mind. Depending on how old you are, we're now familiar with computerised voices, thanks to devices like Texas Instruments' popular 1978 Speak & Spell educational toy, Stephen Hawking's speech synthesiser (memorably sampled in the Pink Floyd song Keep Talking), GPS navigational systems in your car, and any number of public information and call handling systems. More recently, the combination of automatic speech recognition (ASR), natural-language understanding (NLU) and text-to-speech (TTS) has come to mainstream attention in virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri, Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Alexa. Download this article as a PDF (free registration required). To get a handle on how speech technologies work, we clearly need to know something about the mechanics of human speech and the structure of language. When we speak, air from the lungs passes through the vocal tract to produce "voiced" or "unvoiced" sounds (depending on whether the vocal cords are vibrating or not) that may then be modulated by the tongue, teeth and lips.