Google finally told us what to expect with its Google Home product, a new mesh router configuration and an updated Chromecast this week at its hardware event. Kevin and I break down what we know about Google Home, how it compares to other devices on the market and also what we won't know until we get the Home in our hot little hands. I expect mine on Nov. 8-10, so stay tuned. In more serious news, the use of IoT devices as a tool in DDoS attacks has everyone freaked out. We discuss why IoT devices are vulnerable and share a new checklist from the Online Trust Alliance on what you can do to help.

The company's scientists think its new AI-based factotum will be the biggest thing since search. It is the day after Google's big hardware event in San Francisco, when the company formally unveiled a new phone (a jab to the iPhone) and a voice-activated speaker (a gut punch to Amazon's Echo). Word of mouth is already tracking positive; a countdown to ecstasy, in the form of upcoming rhapsodic reviews of the Pixel phone, has already begin. But in a conference room on the company's sprawling Mountain View campus, Fernando Pereira, who leads Google's projects in natural language understanding, is less excited about his company's shiny new devices than he is about what will happen when people use them. "Let me tell you a little bit about The Transition," he says.

When Apple released its software application, Siri, in 2011, iPhone users had high expectations for their intelligent personal assistants. Yet despite its impressive and growing capabilities, Siri often makes mistakes. The software's imperfections highlight the clear limitations of current AI: today's machine intelligence can't understand the varied and changing needs and preferences of human life. However, as artificial intelligence advances, experts believe that intelligent machines will eventually – and probably soon – understand the world better than humans. While it might be easy to understand how or why Siri makes a mistake, figuring out why a superintelligent AI made the decision it did will be much more challenging.

Motivated by online recommendation and advertising systems, we consider a causal model for stochastic contextual bandits with a latent low-dimensional confounder. In our model, there are $L$ observed contexts and $K$ arms of the bandit. The observed context influences the reward obtained through a latent confounder variable with cardinality $m$ ($m \ll L,K$). The arm choice and the latent confounder causally determines the reward while the observed context is correlated with the confounder. Under this model, the $L \times K$ mean reward matrix $\mathbf{U}$ (for each context in $[L]$ and each arm in $[K]$) factorizes into non-negative factors $\mathbf{A}$ ($L \times m$) and $\mathbf{W}$ ($m \times K$). This insight enables us to propose an $\epsilon$-greedy NMF-Bandit algorithm that designs a sequence of interventions (selecting specific arms), that achieves a balance between learning this low-dimensional structure and selecting the best arm to minimize regret. Our algorithm achieves a regret of $\mathcal{O}\left(L\mathrm{poly}(m, \log K) \log T \right)$ at time $T$, as compared to $\mathcal{O}(LK\log T)$ for conventional contextual bandits, assuming a constant gap between the best arm and the rest for each context. These guarantees are obtained under mild sufficiency conditions on the factors that are weaker versions of the well-known Statistical RIP condition. We further propose a class of generative models that satisfy our sufficient conditions, and derive a lower bound of $\mathcal{O}\left(Km\log T\right)$. These are the first regret guarantees for online matrix completion with bandit feedback, when the rank is greater than one. We further compare the performance of our algorithm with the state of the art, on synthetic and real world data-sets.

Apple leaves AirPod buyers up in the air: Firm admits it'needs a little more time' as it delays $159 wireless headphones Apple's $159 AirPods created a huge amount of interest when they were revealed alongside the iPhone 7 earlier this year - but buyers will have to wait to get their hands on a pair. AirPods (pictured right) resemble Apple's older white EarPods (pictured left) minus an attached cable, and connect to your iPhone using a form of Bluetooth technology Although users feel it will only be a matter of time before they lose the AirPods, Apple's CEO Tim Cook says he'has never personally had one fall out since using them'. The tech tycoon suggests it is the wires connected to the earbuds that pull them out of people's ears Slotting the headphones back into the case as music is playing will allow the track is keep going until you close the magnetic lid. Instead of the remote control embedded on the EarPods' wire, you can skip songs or adjust the volume by gently double-tapping on one of the rounded buds, which triggers Apple's digital assistant, Siri The pair use optical sensors and infra-red technology to sense when they've been removed from the wearer's ear We would welcome a set of small buttons on one or both of the AirPods' stems to skip or replay tracks and change the volume while exercising, as Siri voice commands are just not suitable during exercise VERDICT: ARE THE AIRPODS WORTH BUYING? The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

FILE - This undated file image provided by Amazon shows color options of the new Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet. Amazon's Fire tablets are getting the Alexa voice assistant. The previously announced feature will start rolling out to customers Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016. It's meant to complement what users get on other Alexa devices, such as the Echo speaker. Through voice commands, users can get the news read out to them or listen to music from services such as Amazon Music or Pandora.

At present, predictive analytics is the most used form of AI in enterprise and companies are focusing on innovation, patenting their AI developments at a faster rate than ever before. Join us as we explore the rise of artificial intelligence in six charts including the top investors in AI and the most used AI enterprise solutions. As of June 2016, artificial intelligence received $974m of funding. This year's funding is set to surpass 2015's total and CB Insights suggests that 200 AI-focused companies have raised nearly $1.5 billion in equity funding. AI isn't limited to the business sphere, in fact the personal robot market, including'care-bots', could reach $17.4bn by 2020.

Apple Inc. hired a prominent artificial intelligence researcher from Carnegie Mellon University as it seeks to regain lost ground against competitors such as Google, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com He posted a link to an Apple job application page seeking machine learning specialists. Apple is seeking scientists with "experience in Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Optimization, and/or Data Mining," it said in the job listing. So you can sleep an extra five minutes. Travel with us, drive with us, eat with us – around the world.

The Amazon Echo doesn't have a screen, but because the Fire HD 8 tablet does it can show relevant information upon receiving a query. Ask Alexa to play a song on Spotify, for example, and options to pause, skip forward or skip back present themselves. Ask it for the scores from yesterday's game and it will give you a detailed scorecard. Using an actual Echo device under the same Amazon account will still invoke the appearances of info cards on your tablet devices using the new update. Amazon's update comes at a time when Google is anxious to take over the virtual assistant space.

Samsung is turning its attention to personal assistants--the company has acquired Viv Labs, a startup founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, and Chris Brigham, all of whom were part of the original Siri team that Apple bought in 2010. The three departed Apple shortly after the acquisition to start Viv Labs, which recently showed off its AI personal assistant at Disrupt NY. While pricing has not been disclosed, the deal has been confirmed by Kittlaus in a post on Medium. Viv Labs will continue to operate independently from Samsung, but it will share intelligence with the hardware manufacturer with the intent of integrating Viv into products. "Samsung will drastically accelerate our vision," Kittlaus writes.