Personal Assistant Systems
Attention-based Ingredient Phrase Parser
Shi, Zhengxiang, Ni, Pin, Wang, Meihui, Kim, To Eun, Lipani, Aldo
As virtual personal assistants have now penetrated the consumer market, with products such as Siri and Alexa, the research community has produced several works on task-oriented dialogue tasks such as hotel booking, restaurant booking, and movie recommendation. Assisting users to cook is one of these tasks that are expected to be solved by intelligent assistants, where ingredients and their corresponding attributes, such as name, unit, and quantity, should be provided to users precisely and promptly. However, existing ingredient information scraped from the cooking website is in the unstructured form with huge variation in the lexical structure, for example, "1 garlic clove, crushed", and "1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened", making it difficult to extract information exactly. To provide an engaged and successful conversational service to users for cooking tasks, we propose a new ingredient parsing model that can parse an ingredient phrase of recipes into the structure form with its corresponding attributes with over 0.93 F1-score. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on AllRecipes and Food.com datasets.
Google's Home Upgrades Go Further Than New Hardware
Google will be taking the wraps off its Pixel 7 smartphone and Pixel Watch smartwatch at its Made by Google event in New York City later this week, but today, Google-owned Nest is sharing a few new products and updates in the company's smart-home ecosystem--from a new Nest Wifi Pro router with Wi-Fi 6E support to a redesigned Google Home app. Last year, Nest debuted a second-generation Nest Doorbell (Battery), a battery-powered video doorbell. Now, it's time for a second-gen wired version, for those who don't want to worry about their doorbell running out of juice. It looks quite similar and has similar specs but is 30 percent smaller. There's 24/7 recording support, and it stores three hours of important events in its local memory in case your Wi-Fi goes out. The new doorbell's camera isn't as high-resolution as the original Nest Doorbell, with a 960 x 1,280-pixel resolution, but it's the HDR support that takes the camera quality a step further--it'll be able to handle bright lights and better expose your footage.
Get a Fire TV Stick 4K for just £29.99 - plus 10 more Amazon devices deals to shop today
SHOPPING: Products featured in this article are independently selected by our shopping writers. If you make a purchase using links on this page, MailOnline will earn an affiliate commission. Amazon has dropped unmissable discounts on their bestselling Echo, Blink and Fire devices ahead of their Prime Early Access Sale. Amazon has announced it will run its first-ever Prime Early Access Sale ahead of Black Friday, spanning 48 hours from 11 October through 12 October. The Prime Early Access Sale will offer hundreds of thousands of deals, but bargain hunters can already enjoy impressive savings on Amazon Echo and Alexa devices - and you don't have to be a Prime member.
Machine learning in retail: essentials and 10 key applications
In recent years, between lockdowns, curfews, supply chain disruptions, and energy crunches, retailers must have felt like dinosaurs trying to dodge a rain of asteroids and avoid extinction. But unlike those giant prehistoric reptiles, the retail industry could count on a full array of technological innovations to better meet the challenges of these difficult times. One of the most impactful tools in this arsenal has certainly turned out to be artificial intelligence, including its powerful sub-branch known as machine learning (ML). Let's briefly frame the nature of this technology and explore the key use cases of machine learning in retail. Machine learning in retail relies on self-improving computer algorithms created to process data, spot recurring patterns and anomalies among variables, and autonomously learn how such relations affect or determine the industry's trends, phenomena, and business scenarios.
The Long Tail of Context: Does it Exist and Matter?
Bauman, Konstantin, Vasilev, Alexey, Tuzhilin, Alexander
Context has been an important topic in recommender systems over the past two decades. A standard representational approach to context assumes that contextual variables and their structures are known in an application. Most of the prior CARS papers following representational approach manually selected and considered only a few crucial contextual variables in an application, such as time, location, and company of a person. This prior work demonstrated significant recommendation performance improvements when various CARS-based methods have been deployed in numerous applications. However, some recommender systems applications deal with a much bigger and broader types of contexts, and manually identifying and capturing a few contextual variables is not sufficient in such cases. In this paper, we study such ``context-rich'' applications dealing with a large variety of different types of contexts. We demonstrate that supporting only a few most important contextual variables, although useful, is not sufficient. In our study, we focus on the application that recommends various banking products to commercial customers within the context of dialogues initiated by customer service representatives. In this application, we managed to identify over two hundred types of contextual variables. Sorting those variables by their importance forms the Long Tail of Context (LTC). In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that LTC matters and using all these contextual variables from the Long Tail leads to significant improvements in recommendation performance.
The rise of AI and its impact on business
Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, involves using computers to carry out tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as understanding natural language and recognizing patterns. AI works by using a number of different methods to mimic human intelligence, including machine learning, natural language processing and artificial neural networks. An artificial intelligence contact center is a customer service center that uses AI technology to help employees respond to customer inquiries. It can be used to automate tasks such as routing calls, providing information about products and services, and handling complaints. What are chatbots and virtual assistants?
Risk-graded Safety for Handling Medical Queries in Conversational AI
Abercrombie, Gavin, Rieser, Verena
Conversational AI systems can engage in unsafe behaviour when handling users' medical queries that can have severe consequences and could even lead to deaths. Systems therefore need to be capable of both recognising the seriousness of medical inputs and producing responses with appropriate levels of risk. We create a corpus of human written English language medical queries and the responses of different types of systems. We label these with both crowdsourced and expert annotations. While individual crowdworkers may be unreliable at grading the seriousness of the prompts, their aggregated labels tend to agree with professional opinion to a greater extent on identifying the medical queries and recognising the risk types posed by the responses. Results of classification experiments suggest that, while these tasks can be automated, caution should be exercised, as errors can potentially be very serious.
Artificial intelligence more of a secretary than a Skynet
Artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved into a personal digital assistant rather than a physical machine like the Terminator, says Samer Shoueiry of the creative communications group Publicis Communications. And it is developing at a speed that is "incredible", adds the regional executive head of digital and social marketing for the company. "We see AI today in everything we do as the personal digital assistant – someone returning your web searches, filtering your spam emails, the technology assisting everything within your car," he says. AI can be seen in every aspect of technology that links to digitisation, adds Mr Shoueiry, who spoke at the recent Dubai Lynx advertising festival. Research company Forrester claims that cognitive technologies such as AI and machine learning will replace 16 per cent of US jobs by 2025, in a report it published last year entitled Sharing Your Cubicle With Robots.
Amazon's Echo Show 5 drops to a new low of $35
Days after hosting a major hardware launch, Amazon is apparently having a sale on its older Echo devices. Among the deals, we noticed that both the Echo Show 5 and the larger Echo Show 8 have hit new record lows. The Echo Show 5, which went on sale last year for $85, is now down to $35, a 59 percent discount. The 8-inch model, meanwhile, is down to $70 after having debuted at $100. Both devices, but especially the Echo Show 8, were designed to be used as a possible alarm clock, with a sunrise alarm feature that gently wakes you up by slowly brightening the display.
Banks turn to automation to realize efficiency gains
Executives across industries are turning to automation to deliver on cost optimization and enhanced productivity objectives, Saikat Ray, VP analyst at Gartner, told CIO Dive in August. The robotic process automation software market will reach $2.9 billion by the end of 2022, up 19.5% from 2021, according to Gartner. In recent years, large UiPath bank customers have been using automation tools to facilitate initiatives that include data extraction and data transfer efforts to support the merger of BB&T and SunTrust; reduction of manual work for Wells Fargo contact center agents through digital personal assistants; and the delegation of some structured, rule-based repetitive tasks to bots at JPMorgan Chase. From JPMorgan Chase's perspective, one of the next steps on its automation journey will include using bots to tackle more sophisticated tasks, including delving into unstructured processes and unstructured data, and using machine learning to facilitate these efforts, said Shefali Shah, managing director of global digital transformation and integrated intelligent automation at JPMorgan Chase. Diana Caplinger, executive vice president and head of enterprise enablement and intelligent automation at Truist, said the company is deploying automation in support of "integrated relationship management," an effort to use data across the organization to deliver more personalized service to clients.