"Alexa, read us a story." That's one way teachers are using digital assistants, such as the popular Amazon Echo device -- technology that many parents of home-bound students used last year to aid in their children's educational routines -- in the classroom. One school district in California has integrated this technology even further with the Symphony Classroom device from Merlyn Mind, described as the world's first digital assistant for education. The device is powered by Edge AI, combining artificial intelligence with edge computing technology. READ MORE: A digital assistant for educators helps with K–12 classroom management.

Virtual assistants can set timers for people, play music, control smart home devices, respond to voice commands and set up reminders. As of Sunday, they have also proven their ability to challenge children to lethal dares. Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant, recently advised a 10-year-old girl to touch a penny to a live plug socket after she asked the Echo smart speaker for a challenge. "My 10 year old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said," said user Kristin Livdahl in a tweet on Sunday. She accompanied the caption with a screenshot of Alexa's response.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A mom's Amazon Echo reportedly recommended a dangerous online challenge to her child earlier this week. On Sunday, Kristin Livdahl tweeted a screengrab writing, "My 10 year old just asked Alexa on our Echo for a challenge and this is what she said." In the screengrab, which appears to show Livdahl's Echo's activity, the apparent command says, "Tell me a challenge to do" followed by the Echo's response.

Amazon's Alexa voice assistant recommended to a 10-year-old that she give herself an electric shock as part of a "challenge". Kristin Livdahl posted on Twitter that the voice assistant recommended the action after her daughter asked for a challenge. "Here's something I found on the web", Alexa replied. "The challenge is simple: plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs." Ms Livdahl said that she and her daughter were doing some "physical challenges" and that her daughter wanted another one.

Amazon's Alexa recently recommended to a 10 year-old girl that she should put a coin against an electrified plug. The voice assistant gave the response when the child asked for a'challenge' from the Echo speaker. "Here's something I found on the web", Amazon replied, "The challenge is simple: plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs." The dangerous activity, known as "the penny challenge", began circulating on TikTok and other social media websites about a year ago, the BBC reported. Why did Alexa make the suggestion? Amazon Alexa tells 10 year-old child to electrocute themselves for a'challenge' Perseverance rover finds'something no one's ever seen' in search for aliens Huge asteroid hurtling past Earth today Amazon Alexa tells 10 year-old child to electrocute themselves for a'challenge' Perseverance rover finds'something no one's ever seen' in search for aliens The smart speaker made the suggestion because Alexa uses information on the web to give responses to questions it does not know the answer to.

And while the idea of a discounted streaming service you have to talk to may seem a little odd, even that isn't all that weird. Two years ago, Amazon launched a cheaper version of Music Unlimited service that only runs on Echo speakers, and Apple Music's voice plan seemed tailor-made to compete with it on affordable smart speakers like HomePod minis. And if the promise of cheaper music access gets more people talking to Siri, that could mean more training data Apple could use to improve its voice assistant's performance down the road.

We've come a long way since the early days of AI. Today, AI technology is capable of amazing things, like learning how to recognize faces and understand human speech with increasingly impressive accuracy. As the technology continues to advance in the coming years, we'll likely start seeing more AI assistants in our homes and our schools. Though many people think we're on the cusp of making machines that can think and act like humans, it's not quite there yet. AI is an incredibly hot topic right now, and it seems like almost every week a new development in the field makes the news.

It is designed to make the lives of those who work with AI-assistants easy by giving them a no-coding web interface to adapt, train, test and maintain such assistants. While RASA focuses on the technology of chatbots itself, kAIron, on the other hand, focuses on technology that deals with the pre-processing of data that are needed by this framework. These include question augmentation and generation of knowledge graphs that can be used to automatically generate intents, questions and responses.

Not all news surrounding digital assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant is good news. When you think about it, digital assistants are a lot like young children when it comes to brainpower and the ability to always have the right answer. It’s still a fresh corner of the industry that is constantly learning as it goes (with all of us as the guinea pigs). We call them “artificial intelligence“, but it’s still just a bunch of code with mostly dictionary responses or regurgitated web-based search results. So what happened this time? Alexa suggested to a child that it would be a wise challenge to electrocute themselves. Of course, this isn’t what the digital assistant said directly. Instead, the child asked Alexa to present them with a challenge. The response was a TikTok challenge known as “The Penny Challenge” that Alexa found on the web-based on popular traffic. This clearly was not the challenge the kid was hoping for and certainly

In 1960, J.C.R. Licklider, an MIT professor and an early pioneer of artificial intelligence, already envisioned our future world in his seminal article, "Man-Computer Symbiosis": In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. In today's world, such "computing machines" are known as AI assistants. However, developing AI assistants is a complex, time-consuming process, requiring deep AI expertise and sophisticated programming skills, not to mention the efforts for collecting, cleaning, and annotating large amounts of data needed to train such AI assistants. It is thus highly desirable to reuse the whole or parts of an AI assistant across different applications and domains.