In the past, brick-and-mortar retailers leveraged native marketing and advertisement channels to engage with consumers. They have promoted their products and services through TV commercials, and magazine and newspaper ads. Many of them have started using social media and digital advertisements. Although marketing approaches are beginning to modernize and expand to digital channels, businesses still depend on expensive marketing agencies and inefficient manual processes to measure campaign effectiveness and understand buyer behavior. The recent pandemic has forced many retailers to take their businesses online.

Amazon's Echo Show smart displays with Alexa voice control are already a good value next to the competition, but a bunch of deals are making them even cheaper. The Show 5 is the best one, on sale right now for just $40, or 53 percent off the regular price. And if you want a larger screen, you can find great deals on the Show 8 and Show 15 -- including a free Show 5 with the latter. The Echo Show 5 scored a very solid 85 score in our Engadget review, as it's small size is ideal if don't have a ton of space on your desk, nightstand or countertop. It has a 5.5-inch, 960 x 480 resolution display that shows things like weather forecasts, calendar events, photos and more.

These leading Natural Language Processing vendors can help AI deployments "learn" how to listen and interact with humans. As more and more companies adopt artificial intelligence (AI) in a variety of sectors, these AI are inevitably put in positions where they have to interact with human beings. From customer support chatbots to virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa, these use cases necessitate teaching an AI how to listen, learn, and understand what humans are saying to it and how to respond. One method for teaching AI how to communicate with humans is natural language processing (NLP). Sitting at the intersection at AI, computer science, and linguistics, natural language processing's goal is to create or train a computer capable of not just understanding the literal words humans say but also the contextual implications and nuances found in their language.

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) has become an emerging research topic seeking to perform recommendations through interactive conversations, which generally consist of generation and recommendation modules. Prior work on CRS tends to incorporate more external and domain-specific knowledge like item reviews to enhance performance. Despite the fact that the collection and annotation of the external domain-specific information needs much human effort and degenerates the generalizability, too much extra knowledge introduces more difficulty to balance among them. Therefore, we propose to fully discover and extract internal knowledge from the context. We capture both entity-level and contextual-level representations to jointly model user preferences for the recommendation, where a time-aware attention is designed to emphasize the recently appeared items in entity-level representations. We further use the pre-trained BART to initialize the generation module to alleviate the data scarcity and enhance the context modeling. In addition to conducting experiments on a popular dataset (ReDial), we also include a multi-domain dataset (OpenDialKG) to show the effectiveness of our model. Experiments on both datasets show that our model achieves better performance on most evaluation metrics with less external knowledge and generalizes well to other domains. Additional analyses on the recommendation and generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in different scenarios.

So let's dive into some specifics, shall we? In a nutshell, Augment adds numerous augments (get it?!) onto your existing devices. Those lowercase augments are best described as layers of intelligence that observe what you're doing and then step in as needed to make sure you always have the info you need exactly when you need it. If that concept rings a bell, congratulations: You've been paying attention. Philosophically, at least, Augment is strikingly similar to Heyday, a context-surfacing service I covered for Fast Company earlier this year.

As one of the most successful AI-powered applications, recommender systems aim to help people make appropriate decisions in an effective and efficient way, by providing personalized suggestions in many aspects of our lives, especially for various human-oriented online services such as e-commerce platforms and social media sites. In the past few decades, the rapid developments of recommender systems have significantly benefited human by creating economic value, saving time and effort, and promoting social good. However, recent studies have found that data-driven recommender systems can pose serious threats to users and society, such as spreading fake news to manipulate public opinion in social media sites, amplifying unfairness toward under-represented groups or individuals in job matching services, or inferring privacy information from recommendation results. Therefore, systems' trustworthiness has been attracting increasing attention from various aspects for mitigating negative impacts caused by recommender systems, so as to enhance the public's trust towards recommender systems techniques. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of Trustworthy Recommender systems (TRec) with a specific focus on six of the most important aspects; namely, Safety & Robustness, Nondiscrimination & Fairness, Explainability, Privacy, Environmental Well-being, and Accountability & Auditability. For each aspect, we summarize the recent related technologies and discuss potential research directions to help achieve trustworthy recommender systems in the future.

The global AI in retail market size is anticipated to reach USD 40.74 billion by 2030, expanding at a CAGR of 23.9% from 2022 to 2030, according to a new study by Grand View Research, Inc. The rising prominence of advanced technologies, such as chatbots and voice recognition programs, has furthered the growth potential. Moreover, the emerging online retail sales, increasing focus of retailers on improving customers' shopping experience, rising reliance on digital marketing, and growing investments in AI, accompanied by supportive government regulations, are the crucial factors contributing to the progress of the industry worldwide. Read 145 page full market research report for more Insights, "AI In Retail Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Component, By Technology (Chatbots, Natural Language Processing), By Sales Channel, By Application, By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2022 - 2030", published by Grand View Research. AI algorithms play a pivotal role in assessing a considerable amount of data collated from consumers' online behavior.

Learning dynamic user preference has become an increasingly important component for many online platforms (e.g., video-sharing sites, e-commerce systems) to make sequential recommendations. Previous works have made many efforts to model item-item transitions over user interaction sequences, based on various architectures, e.g., recurrent neural networks and self-attention mechanism. Recently emerged graph neural networks also serve as useful backbone models to capture item dependencies in sequential recommendation scenarios. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods have far focused on item sequence representation with singular type of interactions, and thus are limited to capture dynamic heterogeneous relational structures between users and items (e.g., page view, add-to-favorite, purchase). To tackle this challenge, we design a Multi-Behavior Hypergraph-enhanced Transformer framework (MBHT) to capture both short-term and long-term cross-type behavior dependencies. Specifically, a multi-scale Transformer is equipped with low-rank self-attention to jointly encode behavior-aware sequential patterns from fine-grained and coarse-grained levels. Additionally, we incorporate the global multi-behavior dependency into the hypergraph neural architecture to capture the hierarchical long-range item correlations in a customized manner. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our MBHT over various state-of-the-art recommendation solutions across different settings. Further ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our model design and benefits of the new MBHT framework. Our implementation code is released at: https://github.com/yuh-yang/MBHT-KDD22.

This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon. However, we can improve the system's accuracy by leveraging contextual information. Any type of contextual information, like device context, conversational context, and metadata, such as the time the request was issued, etc., could be utilized to customize the underlying ASR model of the conversational agent (Alexa in our case). In this article, we will understand the need for contextual ASR and will also go over how the context vector is created in Alexa and the issues this process presents. Contextual information like the text of a user's request, the history of the user's recent interactions with a virtual assistant, and metadata like the time the request was issued can be used to customize the underlying ASR model to make a context-aware VA.

The concept of machine learning is essentially the same as what it sounds like; it refers to the concept that various forms of technology, such as computers and tablets, can learn something based on programming and other data. Although it has the appearance of an idea from the far future, most people now make regular use of this level of technology. One particularly useful application of this is speech recognition. The technology is utilized by virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa to do tasks such as reciting reminders, answering queries, and carrying out requests. As machine learning becomes increasingly popular, an increasing number of individuals are deciding to specialize in the field as machine learning engineers.