Twitter has announced a new "skill" for Echo devices called Twitter Reader. The company tweeted that you can now "use the Twitter Reader to hear trends, top Tweets, notifications & more!" A report yesterday revealed that Amazon might open up its Alexa ecosystem to allow push notifications, so that it could interrupt to warn you about a traffic jam, for instance. However, Twitter also added "Just #AskAlexa" hashtag, so the new feature apparently doesn't support push notifications just yet. It does give you a lot of options -- you can ask Alexa to read back recent tweets, trending topics and even your own tweets. The device is surprisingly prudish and censors profanity, as PC Mag discovered, so if your feed is like mine, that could be a lot of beeping.

Welcome to DeveloperEconomics' weekly news roundup. In this edition, Google cancels its modular smartphone project, Apple plans to delete abandoned apps from the App Store and Epic releases a new version of Unreal Engine 4. Read on for the full news rundown. Google has expanded its Early Access beta testing, allowing any developer apply for the program. Previously, Early Access was only available to 29 hand-picked developers, who got to test out their apps with early-adopters (although other devs were given different testing options). Google says the Early Access program generated over 1 million beta installs since launching in May and "demand is only growing."

As it pulls the plug on iPhone jacks, Apple is making what appears to be a concerted move into machine learning as it seeks to upgrade its next operating system to improve its Siri virtual assistant along with emerging machine learning applications expected to find their way into other Apple devices. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) watchers point to last month's acquisition of machine learning startup Turi for about 200 million as another sign that the consumer electronics giants is laying the groundwork for a machine learning push. The Seattle-based startup's machine learning platform focuses on rapid development of real-time services and applications based on embedded machine learning models. Turi is seen as a natural fit for Apple's machine learning push since its application toolkits based on the Python programming language are designed to simplify development of machine learning models that can be embedded into applications and quickly scaled.

When will iOS 10 be released in the UK? What are iOS 10's best new features, and what are the differences between iOS 10 and iOS 9? Which iPhones, iPads and iPod touch models can run iOS 10, and is it possible to install iOS 10 right now? It showcased the software as it had done at WWDC in June. We've got all the details about iOS 10 that you need to know: all of its best and most interesting features, how to install it, and a list of the iPads and iPhones that can run it. Since then Apple has released a series of beta versions of iOS 10, and the final public version will roll out on 13 September to iPhone 5 and later and the iPad mini 2, iPad 4, iPad Air and later generations. In this article you'll find: the 10 best new features in iOS 10; when iOS 10 will be released to the public, and how to download it ahead of the official launch; a list of iPads and iPhones that can run iOS 10; and everything else you need to know about iOS 10 and its imminent launch. Updated, 9 September 2016, with the news that the iOS 10 final release candidate is being rolled out; on 7 September, following 13 September release date; on 31 August with news of Apple's newly announced press event on 7 September; on 24 August with news of iOS 10 beta 7; and on 23 August with iOS 10 release date rumours courtesy of Barbra Streisand Update, 9 September 2016: Apple has notified all members of its iOS beta program that the final release candidate is being rolled out today. "We are pleased to give you access to the iOS 10 and macOS Sierra final release candidates," says Apple, in an email. "We will be shipping the final versions to customers worldwide in the coming weeks and appreciate you trying out the releases and providing feedback. You can install the iOS 10 GM candidate from Software Update."

Fintech start-up Clinc says it has created "the world's first" open source platform for building artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning-based personal assistants. Clinc calls it "the financial genie" or "Finie". It is pitched to banks, financial institutions and personal finance managers. The solution was developed by a group of professors at the University of Michigan, Jason Mars, Lingjia Tang and Michael Laurenzano. They set up Clinc in 2015, with Mars as CEO, Tang as chief scientific officer, and Laurenzano as CTO.

Tom Goodwin is senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media. With smartphones in all of our pockets, it's easy to laugh at Thomas Watson's reputed remark that "there is a world market for about five computers." But what if he was off by only four computers instead of four billion? In the early 2000s, we lived in an era of expensive storage and slow connectivity. Those of us tasked with predicting the future faced a dilemma: Would processing and storage get so cheap that each and every device could store everything ever made, or would connectivity become so robust and far-reaching that everything would be stored remotely.

In a variety of application domains the content to be recommended to users is associated with text. This includes research papers, movies with associated plot summaries, news articles, blog posts, etc. Recommendation approaches based on latent factor models can be extended naturally to leverage text by employing an explicit mapping from text to factors. This enables recommendations for new, unseen content, and may generalize better, since the factors for all items are produced by a compactly-parametrized model. Previous work has used topic models or averages of word embeddings for this mapping. In this paper we present a method leveraging deep recurrent neural networks to encode the text sequence into a latent vector, specifically gated recurrent units (GRUs) trained end-to-end on the collaborative filtering task. For the task of scientific paper recommendation, this yields models with significantly higher accuracy. In cold-start scenarios, we beat the previous state-of-the-art, all of which ignore word order. Performance is further improved by multi-task learning, where the text encoder network is trained for a combination of content recommendation and item metadata prediction. This regularizes the collaborative filtering model, ameliorating the problem of sparsity of the observed rating matrix.

Amazon wants to be under the Christmas tree this year. It's cut the price of its new Fire tablet almost in half and added its popular voice assistant, Alexa, in hopes of making it a hot holiday item, despite a slump in overall tablet sales. The new Fire HD8 tablet will cost 90, down from 150. Amazon cut the price of its new Fire tablet almost in half and added its popular voice assistant, Alexa, in hopes of making it a hot holiday item, despite a slump in overall tablet sales. Mixed-use battery life is up to 12 hours from 8, and the base storage is doubled to 16 gigabytes.

Amazon is eyeing spoken push notifications for the Amazon Echo, and it could either be a really great or a really terrible thing depending on how the service is set up. For instance, if Alexa could offer notifications customized by time, place and type, it could perhaps let you know if the email you've been waiting for about that event coming up has arrived. It could alert you to terrible traffic conditions in relation to appointments you need to make. That's looking on the bright side, however, as Alexa's spoken notifications could quickly bug users, even though it's an interesting suggestion for a feature. It would need a large set of customizational tools and permissions to work as flawlessly as it should in theory, but perhaps Amazon could figure it out.

The new Sling TV app looks a lot like a slightly tweaked version of its Summer redesign. The content-centric UI still features a My TV section, with the ability to resume watching paused shows, and the more convenient browsing interface, but navigation has been moved to the left side feel more natural to Windows users. Live Tiles, Cortana voice search and touch compatibility for tablets are also baked in. Sling TV says it will continue to support it's legacy desktop app for users on older platforms and those who simply don't wish to use the Windows Store. Sadly, that application isn't getting a visual overhaul: It's stuck with the same interface the service launched with over a year ago.