If you missed the sale last month on the Nest Thermostat, you have another chance to grab the smart home gadget for even less now. Amazon has the snow colored WiFi thermostat for $93, or 29 percent off its normal price. This isn't an all-time low -- the device briefly dropped to $80 during Black Friday weekend last year -- but this is the best price we've seen since then. Google debuted the Nest Thermostat in 2020 as an affordable alternative to the Nest Learning Thermostat. You'll notice a big difference in the design of the two gadgets: the Nest Thermostat is slimmer than its Learning counterpart and has a mirrored display, along with a touch-sensitive bezel that you can use to manually adjust temperature settings.

If you're interested in obscure things, there are two reasons why your searches for items and products are likely to be less related to your interests than those of your'mainstream' peers; either you're a monetization'edge case' whose interests will only be catered to if you're also in the upper categories of economic purchasing power (for example, products and services related to'wealth management'); or the search algorithms that you're using are leveraging collaborative filtering (CF), which favors the interests of the majority. Since collaborative filtering is cheaper and more established than other potentially more capable algorithms and frameworks, it's possible that both these cases apply. CF-based search results will prioritize items that are perceived to be popular among'people like you', as best the host framework can understand what kind of a consumer you are. If you're wary of providing data profiling information to the host system – for instance, not inclined to press the'Like' buttons in Netflix and other video content services – you're likely to be classified quite generically in your earliest interactions with the system, and the recommendations you receive will reflect the most popular trends. On a streaming platform, that could mean being recommended whatever shows and movies are currently'hot', such as reality TV and forensic murder documentaries, irrespective of your interest in these.

Have you wondered what powers the highly personalized recommendations on your mobile device from Amazon? Do you wonder how Uber determines arrival times of your booked app cab? I am sure most of you have wondered at some point in time, how Snapchat uses filters or influences stories. These are everyday examples of machine learning algorithms at work. The common thread is acting quickly on business intelligence for an edge in highly competitive industries.

Meta has big plans for the future. And they all involve extracting even more data from consumers. Last week, the company released a positioning statement emphasizing a bold, tech-driven vision for its metaverse ambitions: smarter personal assistants, a fully immersive AR/VR experience, universal language translation, self-supervised machine learning, human-like AI, etc. All of this comes with the expressed goal of providing advertisers with richer behavioral data about consumers and reassurances that Meta will accomplish all of this in an ethically sound fashion. However, Meta's route forward may contain more roadblocks than the company is anticipating.

Artificial intelligence is proving to be one of the pillars on which the metaverse will be built. Starting with the processing of user-generated data, continuing with generative AI models that create photorealistic virtual environments and avatars that resemble users, as well as the ability to recognise body movements and thus make the metaverse experience more natural. But AI will also spark new life into the digital characters that populate virtual worlds, such as non-human characters and personal assistants, and enable everyone to understand each other in their own language by translating speech simultaneously. Artificial intelligence could help create increasingly engaging and user-friendly experiences to maximise activity and engagement time as is the case in social networks today, and could act as a watchdog, stopping harassment before it even happens, as long as we don't have a problem with an intrusive AI listening to all our conversations and judging our every move. One of the difficulties we have today is to define with sufficient accuracy what the metaverse is, a term that has come to the fore more for marketing reasons than anything else.

Every person interacts with some device or application that is AI-enabled at least once a day. That is how widespread AI is today. Every time you perform a voice search using Siri or Google Assistant, you are leveraging the power of artificial intelligence. As AI continues to evolve and improve, it will find more and more practical use in everyday business operations. Moving into 2022, AI will play a pivotal role in influencing digital transformation across industries.

There is proliferating popularity for virtual assistants in enabling a smart and efficient work environment. Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana are the best examples of how people find virtual assistants are aiding in streamlining their everyday activity. On the work front, Virtual assistant tools are in place to help with mundane tasks. As technologies advance, their sphere of influence also widens. According to a report by Gartner, both consumers and businesses will be spending $3.5 billion by end of 2021 on Virtual Personal Assistants.

There are only a few weeks left of winter, so it's time for many folks to start planning their outdoor setup so they can get the most out of the warmer months. Unfortunately, that means irritating bugs like mosquitos are on the way back. To ward off those pesky pests, Thermacell has released a smart mosquito repellent system called Liv. Liv connects multiple repeller units to a smart hub. You can switch the system on and off using the hub, Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.

It's been about a year since Sonos released the Roam, the company's smallest and least expensive speaker yet. As with most modern Sonos speakers, the Roam has a built-in microphone that lets you use the speaker with Amazon's Alexa or the Google Assistant. Today, Sonos is releasing a variant of the Roam that omits that microphone, the Roam SL. Aside from removing the microphone, the $159 Roam SL is identical to the original Roam, which costs $20 more. It's a small speaker that can connect to your WiFi network and be part of a Sonos multi-room audio system. But it also has a built-in battery and Bluetooth capabilities, so you can take it with you and use it away from a WiFi connection.

They also interview Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, hosts of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. And finally, they put a listener's anagram skills to the test. You don't want to miss this! You could win a year's membership to Slate Plus. Do you have any language questions or fun facts to share?