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?

So much about being single is great: being able to eat, watch and do what you want; independence; no in-laws. But routine can easily turn into a rut, which makes life difficult if you want to find a relationship. We asked the experts how you might go about shaking things up. It is easy to mistake a presence on dating apps with putting yourself out there. Unless you make an effort to meet people, apps can soon become a time-suck. Annie Lord, a dating columnist for Vogue whose memoir Notes on Heartbreak will be published in June, recommends using them at a particular time, "rather than spending every evening just scrolling", and making a plan to meet any promising matches as soon as possible.

Digital transformation was taking place in fits and starts before the pandemic, but now digital initiatives are accelerating rapidly. Digitalization using new technologies including artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud are at the heart of this acceleration and this has been more rampant in the financial services sector, also driven by rapid technological innovation and quickly shifting customer preferences. During the COVID-19 global pandemic, the number one business priority was the safety and well-being of employees, businesses also worked overtime to meet the changing needs of clients. Companies turned to AI and machine learning to deliver novel digital customer journeys and eliminate unnecessary interventions in the most routine, repetitive, and paper intensive tasks. Virtual assistants became a critical tool for large organizations and governments during the pandemic. Nearly 43% of businesses globally accelerated their rollout of AI over the last year, according to IBM's 2021 Global AI Adoption Index, as organizations looked to virtual assistants to manage swelling call volumes and other similar pathways to automation.

Chances are, if you're reading this article, you have at least one smart home device in your household. After all, according to several studies on the topic, nearly half of U.S. households currently have at least one. From smart speakers and connected thermostats to light bulbs and video cameras, these gadgets have quickly moved from cutting edge to mainstream. If you have multiple smart devices in your home, you've likely discovered what's keeping much of the remaining half of U.S. households from buying their first one. It's hard to make them work together.