A Canadian start-up has developed a voice imitation programme capable of mimicking a person's voice after just a minute of listening to them speak. Developed by AI firm Lyrebird, the algorithm uses machine learning to synthesise speech based on audio samples and is even able to replicate emotion. Lyrebird's algorithm is capable of generating new voices from scratch as well as replicating those of others. After hearing an audio clip, the programme determines the defining feature or "key" to the person's voice and then uses this to generate words from scratch. It even varies the intonations it applies so that a repeated sentence doesn't sound the same way twice.

Amazon was quick to pledge support for the Matter smart home standard, and now it's clear just when (and if) you can expect the technology to reach your household. The company has confirmed that 17 Echo devices, plugs, switches and bulbs will support Matter over WiFi in December, with 30 Echo and Eero products offering support by early next year. You'll initially need Android to set this up (Apple only released the Matter-friendly iOS 16.1 days ago), and the focus will be on lighting. However, support for iOS, Thread and more smart home tech is also due in early 2023. The support will extend to years-old Echo products.

When you think of artificial intelligence (AI), you probably think of human-looking robots. Maybe a bit of fear mixed with a pinch of excitement. Whatever you think of, you most likely don't pair it with marketing. The thing is, you can. AI can improve the customer experience and handle your data more efficiently. Plus, as a bonus, it just sounds cool.

If you thought Alexa was only there to tell you the weather or who scored in the football, think again. Amazon now envisions its virtual assistant becoming a'trusted adviser and companion', and'anticipating' what we want to do, according to its chief scientist. Speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon yesterday, Rohit Prasad said: 'If I ask Alexa, what hike should I do? Just like a friend, because it knows me, Alexa should tell me: you should do this hike.' The tech giant is envisioning a home with various sensors in each room - from microphones to ultrasound - working in the background, he said.

Digital human recommendation system has been developed to help customers find their favorite products and is playing an active role in various recommendation contexts. How to timely catch and learn the dynamics of the preferences of the customers, while meeting their exact requirements, becomes crucial in the digital human recommendation domain. We design a novel practical digital human interactive recommendation agent framework based on Reinforcement Learning(RL) to improve the efficiency of the interactive recommendation decision-making by leveraging both the digital human features and the superior flexibility of RL. Our proposed framework learns through real-time interactions between the digital human and customers dynamically through the state-of-the-art RL algorithms, combined with multi-modal embedding and graph embedding, to improve the accuracy of personalization and thus enable the digital human agent to timely catch the attention of the customer. Experiments on real business data demonstrate that our framework can provide better personalized customer engagement and better customer experiences.

In particular, it said weaker economic conditions are weighing on brands such as Plenty of Fish, which cater to people with lower incomes, while people were starting to make fewer in-app purchases on its platforms.

For those reasons, you probably shouldn't keep an Echo with this feature in your home office, or anywhere with a lot of devices trying to do things at the same time. If one of your gadgets does latch onto the speaker's network, you may wind up with a limit on your internet performance without even realizing the switch has been made.

Kids love to use smart speakers, but it's all too easy for things to go horribly wrong -- including content that's decidedly not family-friendly. Google is trying to address those worries by both revising parental controls for Assistant and providing more child-oriented responses. To start, an update will let you disable some Assistant features, restrict the services children can use and establish downtime hours. You can bar kids from making calls, or limit them to watching YouTube Kids on a Nest Hub. The controls will be available in the "coming weeks" through the Google Assistant, Google Home and Family Link apps for Android and iOS.

You can set limits and block specific content on your child's smartphone, tablet, or computer, but the smart speakers and smart displays in your home are something of a loophole. If your kids are anything like mine, you've probably caught them asking weird questions to voice assistants or watching a video when it's homework time. Well, there's good news: Google is closing this loophole with a set of parental controls for Google Assistant. These new controls enable you to set a Downtime that works across shared family devices and will restrict content and functionality based on who is asking. You can restrict your kids to YouTube Kids for video and Spotify Kids for music, for example.

Mankind's technological advancements have been developing at such breakneck speeds that we often take for granted how they have made our lives easier. One of the most interesting results of human brainpower is the machine-like replication of itself: artificial intelligence. AI is already present in our daily tasks, from search engines, algorithms, virtual assistant technology, and the like. However, there seems to be budding movements in applying AI technologies to the cultural productions, with some already venturing into anime and art. Should this prove successful both commercially and critically, it is only inevitable that this AI movement would permeate the cultural zeitgeist of other media, and one that is of great interest is the medium of film.