Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant is spreading to third-party hardware with the Triby connected speaker. The 199 Triby from Invoxia is in some ways similar to Amazon's Echo speaker. Using Alexa voice commands, it connects to Internet radio services such as Pandora and Spotify, delivers the weather and other information, lets you buy stuff from Amazon, and can control a range of connected-home devices. And like the Echo, the Triby supports always-on voice commands, so you can control these functions from across the room. But while Echo requires a power cord to operate, Triby has a built-in battery that lasts up to two weeks on a charge, and provides eight to 10 hours of music playback.

Not sure what to get for Mother's Day? Columnist Jennifer Jolly shows off great tech gifts for Mom. Amazon's Echo smart home hub has become a sleeper hit for the company. Mother's Day is coming up fast and that special gift that makes her feel all warm and fuzzy inside? Well it isn't just going to make, or buy, itself. Here are 10 of this year's most-wanted mom gadgets sure to show her how much you appreciate her, all year long.

Every passing year marks the introduction of a technological advancement which affords some new form of progressive automation. Members of the millennial generation, like myself, are no strangers to the integration of robotic technology in daily life. I remember delighting in the introduction of self-checkout machines at the grocery store as a young kid, begging my grandmother to use the machines. Unfortunately, my old-fashioned grandmother never let me use the self-checkout, as she did not trust the technology to get the job done. New robotic technology has always made older generations understandably uneasy, especially since pop culture tends not to portray robots in the best light (who remembers The Stepford Wives or I, Robot?) Often, robotic technology is suspected of being too generalized, and unable to tailor tasks to an individual's specific needs.

You guys might be familiar with the Amazon Echo. It is basically a speaker that can also perform actions for its user, like you could tell it to order you a pizza and so on thanks to its built-in voice assistant, Alexa. That being said, the Echo has so far proven to be quite a success and it looks like Samsung could want in on the action as well. According to a report from Engadget, Samsung recently took the wraps off a prototype robot called the Otto at their developer conference today. At its core, the Otto appears to function similarly to the Amazon Echo as it will be able to understand users and the voice commands that they issue.

Amazon said that a review of its entire U.S. staff found that women's compensation in 2015 was 99.9% of men's in equivalent jobs. Further, minorities make 100.1% of what white workers earn. SAN FRANCISCO -- Hear an echo? Amazon's first quarter results are likely to recall the themes of previous quarters, including the march of Prime and its cloud services business. Last year was an excellent one for the Seattle-based retailer.

April 28--Microsoft artificial intelligence guru Eric Horvitz has reeled in another award for his work making computers smarter. Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft'sRedmond research lab, on Wednesday received the prestigious ACM -- AAAI Allen Newell award for his work building tools that help computers better understand and react to human intent. Horvitz, at Microsoft since 1993, is a well respected researcher in artificial intelligence, a field booming along with the recent availability of the virtually unlimited on-demand computing power and data storage that accompanies cloud computing. Those advances, building off of work by Horvitz and others, has led to nascent services that scratch at the surface of machine intelligence, including Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana, Google's Now, and a host of intelligent algorithms powering things like Web search and document discovery. "There's a huge opportunity ahead in building systems that work closely with people to help them to achieve their goals," Horvitz said in a Microsoft blog post.

Recommender Systems (RS) [1] are a kind of system that seek to recommend to users what they are likely interested in. Unlike search engines, the users do not need to type any keyword. The RS's will learn their interest automatically. For instance, if the user has just bought a numeric camera, the RS will recommend to him some SD memory cards; if a user watches a lot of action movies, the RS may suggest some other action movies to him. And this is the typical behaviors which we observe universally in Netflix (movies), Youtube (videos), Google Play (apps), Facebook (friends), Amazon (goods) and other platforms today.

Unlike the Echo though, it also has an HD camera on the face of it that can recognize faces or act as a security camera. There's also a small screen on it that displays a semblance of a face, plus it shows a variety of animations as well. If the weather is "rain," it'll show animations of rain drops, for example. As you can see in the video demo here, it can also "sing" and "dance" by bobbing its head around. It's being shown off at Samsung's developer conference to demo Samsung's ARTIK Internet of Things platform, which got the official nod from the company today as developers are now encouraged to create apps and devices to support it.

The findings of a recent survey from Nuance Communications into consumer preferences and expectations around customer self-service reveals that a significant number of consumers (89%) prefer, and even expect, to have conversational interaction. For 87%, a positive interaction with a company determines whether or not they will continue their relationship. With chat bots to the front of mind following Facebook's recent announcement, it is interesting to note from Nuance's survey that 89% of consumers "want to engage with virtual assistants to quickly find information instead of searching through Web pages or a mobile phone app on their own". The same need is reflected in consumers' desire to engage with automated phone systems that allow them to speak naturally. Nuance recently announced that one of the leading financial institutes in Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is now using Nuance Nina, and intelligent virtual assistant that delivers "a human-like, conversational customer service experience" to assist customers to quickly and easily access information.

Most singles use Tinder or some other dating site, but that doesn't mean they want to tell everyone. Following a rollout of a test feature in Australia, Tinder received complaints that the app was outing users to their Facebook friends. After using'Tinder Social', members' names and dating profiles were added to a list that was shared with their Facebook friends who also use the app – exposing who is swiping for dates. Tinder is testing a new feature in Australian that lets users organize group dates, but the new feature is also outing them to their Facebook friends. By using'Tinder Social', users' names and dating profiles are being added to a public list that is shared with their Facebook friends who also use the app Tinder is testing a new feature in Australian that lets users organize group dates, but the new feature is also outing them to their Facebook friends.