Google Home may have only been living with us for a short time, but it's quickly becoming our favorite thing in the house. And now it's starting to play a little nicer with the other things we love, with Netflix and Google Photos support beginning to roll out to users. First spotted by Android Police, the update brings a new Videos and Photos tab to the Google Home app's Assistant settings, inside which you will see options for linking your Netflix account and enabling Google Photos. As described in the app, the new features, which require a separate Chromecast and Netflix subscription, will allow users to stream photos to their TV and "play shows and movies by asking your Assistant." Last week, Google announced it was opening its Actions on Google platform, allowing developers to tap directly into the digital assistant to bring voice commands for things like food ordering, news, and shopping, as well as enabling two-way conversations with the device.

Dating apps like Tinder make it easy to meet new people - but many profiles on Tinder can be misleading. Spin the Bottle, a new video dating app, wants to take people away from misleading profile pictures and go straight to face time. "Looking into someone's eyes and having a conversation, even a 30 second one, can be much more revealing than reading a list of interests and seeing a gallery of heavily edited, perfectly filtered selfies," Matthew Cohen, CEO of Spin the Bottle, told IBTimes. Spin the Bottle dating app is played just like the classic party game, only it's with people from your area that are looking to meet. "I immediately thought of developing a dating app because most dating apps are photo-based, which doesn't give you much insight into personality or chemistry," Cohen said.

The Magento eCommerce platform has been revolutionizing online businesses for many years. It is highly successful due to its sophisticated style, overall functionality, and the platform's modularity. Magento continues to grow, and new plugins are constantly being developed, cementing its place as one of the top e-commerce platforms in the world for businesses of all sizes. It provides a storefront for businesses, calculates shipping, and processes payments, all in one easy to use system. It provides each business with analytics and reporting, product browsing, easy cataloging, the creation of customer accounts, high-quality customer service, order management, SEO, marketing tools, and much more.

MANILA, Philippines – This is not a phone conversation or a chat session with a customer service representative. Alexa is the digital voice assistant residing inside Amazon's wifi-enabled, voice-controlled smart speakers Amazon Echo and Amazon Echo Dot. Her capabilities go beyond rattling off the day's news or the weather, or playing music. She can order pizza, shoes, jewellery or even an Uber ride (at least in the US). You can ask her to turn on or off your TV, the lights or adjust the temperature in your room (provided you have a connected home).

There have been several discussions lately around machine intelligence that are started to converge in how they may change competition and regulation in all markets but is likely to become a bigger issue in 2017. This is a bubble waiting to burst. The recent letter for Apple to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding policy changes to help promote automated self-driving vehicles stressed not just a level playing field to promote new technology and data sharing but also the impact of automated vehicles on the public good, including their consequences for employment and public spaces. Other issues around consumer product automation in the home with Amazon Echo Alexa and Google Home have raised the bar in interactive systems and questions over the type of privacy and data use issues these may bring. Other issues have been raised over the use by Facebook of algorithms for "editing" the social media sites for certain political issues or in the case of their entry to the Chinese market and creating a censoring app to comply with regulations.

This means the intersection of IoT, point of sale, payments, analytics and loyalty, among others. In this article, you will hear a broad spectrum of my own interests and some predictions and insights on the future or retail, technology in 2017 and beyond. Since Star Cloud itself is in the business of IoT, and connecting the cloud, devices in the store (such as printers) with mobile and the consumers themselves, while empowering small businesses in the process, we realize that now more than ever, everything is connected. Amazon Go is remarkable as an example of the confluence of sensor data that will be possible in the future store. We believe analytics are a bit part of how retailers of the future will be able to leverage data in the brick-and-mortar shopping locations of the next decade.

Disruption ahead: Deloitte's point of view on IBM Watson8 9. What makes Watson unique In technical terms, IBM Watson is an advanced open-domain question answering (QA) system with deep natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. At this point, the Watson Software as a Service (SaaS) platform is most effectively used to sift through massive amounts of text--documents, emails, social posts, and more--to answer questions in real time. Watson accepts questions posed by the user in natural language and provides the user with a response (or a set of responses) by generating and evaluating various hypotheses around different interpretations of the question and possible answers to it. Unlike keyword-based search engines, which simply retrieve relevant documents, Watson gleans context from the question to provide the user with precise and relevant answers, along with confidence ratings and supporting evidence. Its learning capabilities allow Watson to adapt and improve hypothesis generation and evaluation processes over time through interactions with users. Developers and other users can improve the accuracy of responses by "training" Watson. IBM is also continuing to expand Watson's capabilities to incorporate visualization, reasoning, ability to relate to users, and deeper exploration to gain a broader understanding of the information content. Watson recently launched a new platform service that has the ability to ingest and interpret still and video images, which is another significant type of unstructured data.

An internet mastermind decided to have some fun with his Google Home and Amazon Echo and locked them into a loop. Obviously we don't have the type of artificial intelligence that appears in Westworld today, but we do interact with some form of A.I. everyday. Whether it's Pandora predicting what kind of music you might like or a smart car A.I. is all around us. One particular piece of A.I. continues to get more and more prevalent, virtual assistants. It started with Siri on your phone, but has now moved into the home with Google Home and Amazon Echo.

Earlier this month, the internet got in a froth about Apple's decision to drop the 3.5mm analogue audio jack from the new iPhone. Users took to Twitter to vent their outrage, while tech analysts, such as Paul Erickson at IHS Technology, suggested that the removal was money-driven: "It should be noted that wireless models are the highest revenue-generating products within the headphone market," he told the Financial Times. Further disapproval was directed at Apple's replacement for wired earphones, the AirPod, essentially a wireless earphone and microphone – "like a tampon without a string" according to the Guardian – while the writers of US late-night talkshow Conan created a satirical Apple ad featuring the devices plopping from users' ears to floor and being eaten by their pet dogs. Yet, as Chris Saad, head of product at Uber, has pointed out in a post on Medium, Apple did more than launch some earbuds: "They launched a wireless microphone as well." By which he means the day when we converse all day long with a virtual assistant similar to the one voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Her is drawing closer.

An artificial intelligence program has written a Christmas carol. Researchers at the University of Toronto used their "" program to write a Christmas carol based off of a "Christmassy photograph," The Guardian reports. The scientists simply uploaded the photograph into a computer hosting the program and then "let it do its thing." The artificial intelligence program then wrote several lines of lyrics and sang them to music it Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Computer Software Artificial intelligence Google's DeepMind'Lab' opens up source code, joins race to develop artificial general intelligence Following right on its heels came Google's that, its machine learning platform, has created a "lab." The DeepMind Lab offers a 3D training environment, and its entire code library is now available on the open source hosting service GitHub. With Universe, OpenAI aimed to address a primary challenge for AI research, which is a lack of "a large variety of realistic environments [for AI agents to] learn progressively more Read More ... Tags: Computer systems Artificial intelligence Artificial general intelligence Places: Americas North America United States Microsoft's digital assistant, Cortana, could be getting an upgrade--and Intel may be helping.