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 Personal Assistant Systems


The making of an intelligent virtual agent (IVA)

#artificialintelligence

For years, businesses have sought to provide customers with more self-service options and increase automation rates in their contact centers using speech-enabled interactive voice response systems (IVRs). They have also invested heavily in developing web chatbots. However, these systems were complicated to develop and required organizations to purchase, host, and manage a vast array of software, hardware, and equipment. Applications were also created in silos, requiring multiple development projects while making it difficult for applications to share data and context. A number of disruptive innovations have made it easier and more affordable to deploy AI-and-speech-enabled self-service.


Adaptively Weighted Top-N Recommendation for Organ Matching

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reducing the shortage of organ donations to meet the demands of patients on the waiting list has being a major challenge in organ transplantation. Because of the shortage, organ matching decision is the most critical decision to assign the limited viable organs to the most suitable patients. Currently, organ matching decisions were only made by matching scores calculated via scoring models, which are built by the first principles. However, these models may disagree with the actual post-transplantation matching performance (e.g., patient's post-transplant quality of life (QoL) or graft failure measurements). In this paper, we formulate the organ matching decision-making as a top-N recommendation problem and propose an Adaptively Weighted Top-N Recommendation (AWTR) method. AWTR improves performance of the current scoring models by using limited actual matching performance in historical data set as well as the collected covariates from organ donors and patients. AWTR sacrifices the overall recommendation accuracy by emphasizing the recommendation and ranking accuracy for top-N matched patients. The proposed method is validated in a simulation study, where KAS [60] is used to simulate the organ-patient recommendation response. The results show that our proposed method outperforms seven state-of-the-art top-N recommendation benchmark methods.


Toward AI Assistants That Let Designers Design

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI for supporting designers needs to be rethought. It should aim to cooperate, not automate, by supporting and leveraging the creativity and problem-solving of designers. The challenge for such AI is how to infer designers' goals and then help them without being needlessly disruptive. We present AI-assisted design: a framework for creating such AI, built around generative user models which enable reasoning about designers' goals, reasoning, and capabilities.


Swiping right on jabs: dating app adds Covid vaccine badges in Australia

The Guardian

Single Australians looking for sex or love will soon stand out from the competition if they've been vaccinated against Covid-19. Dating app Bumble announced it will roll out a new feature this week enabling users in Australia and New Zealand to add a "vaccination badge" to their profile if they've received a Covid-19 jab. Competitor Tinder says it looks forward to "making [vaccine] badges available soon" in Australia too. A Bumble representative says it will not independently verify the vaccination status of those who claim the badge, meaning the system will rely on user honesty. The dating app says it decided to launch the feature after a recent survey revealed a "45% increase in users asking potential dates if they had the vaccine or have Covid symptoms". It's not just in Australia that dating apps are encouraging users to boast about their vaccination status.


Current Echo smart speakers and displays will support Matter, Amazon says

PCWorld

Matter, the open-source smart home standard that promises to unite Amazon's, Apple's, and Google's smart home platforms, is one of the most exciting developments that we're tracking in the smart home space. Now comes word that most Amazon Echo speakers will receive firmware updates enabling them to support Matter. The announcement, made during Amazon's Alexa Live developer conference today, means that almost all Alexa-powered Echo devices will be able to control Matter-enabled smart products, a development that will give the upcoming standard a major boost. All current and many legacy Echo speakers will get the Matter update, Amazon says. Indeed, only three older Echo speakers won't work with Matter: the first-generation Echo and Echo Dot speakers, as well as the Amazon Tap, a long-discontinued portable Bluetooth speaker with Alexa on board.


Amazon says most Echo speakers will support the Matter smart home platform

Engadget

Amazon's support for the Matter smart home platform is coming into focus. Previously known as Project Chip (Connected Home over IP), Matter comes from the Connectivity Standards Alliance, a group made up of device manufacturers like Amazon, Google, Apple and Samsung. It's meant to standardize voice assistant support across multiple devices, as well as to make it easier to connect smart home gadgets to your home network. During its Alexa Live developer presentation, Amazon said that practically every plug-in Echo speaker will support Matter, save for the first-generation Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Tap, The Verge reports. It's unclear when the Echo support will actually arrive, but at this point we're expecting Matter devices to launch later this year. Google has already declared strong commitment for the platform -- so much so that we've speculated it could help unite the fragmented smart home ecosystem.


Just What You're Looking For: Recommender Team Suggests Winning Strategies

#artificialintelligence

The final push for the hat trick came down to the wire. Five minutes before the deadline, the team submitted work in its third and hardest data science competition of the year in recommendation systems. Called RecSys, it's a relatively new branch of computer science that's spawned one of the most widely used applications in machine learning, one that helps millions find what they want to watch, buy and play. The team's combination of six AI models packed into the contest's limit of 20 gigabytes all of the smarts it culled from studying 750 million data points. An unusual rule in the competition said the models had to run in less than 24 hours on a single core in a cloud CPU.


Fix Alexa Red Ring Issue In Easy Steps?

#artificialintelligence

So, your amazon alexa echo device is showing a red ring which is neither sending and recieving commands which is commonly known as Alexa Red Ring Of Death or telling you "I am having trouble connecting to the internet. Take a look at the help section in your Alexa app" with a Red light Ring emitting on the top of your device when giving commands to it. Well, in a nutshell your alexa device has lost the internet connection and is no longer connected to your wifi or your device is on mute mode. But don't feel like you are only a victim of this Alexa Red Ring Issue as this problem is encountered by wide number of amazon echo device users but following our simple troubleshooting guide they have been able to resolve this issue quickly within a short span of time. So keep reading this blog till the last to fix and eliminate red ring on Alexa easily.


Council Post: Why Are There So Few Direct-To-Consumer AI Startups?

#artificialintelligence

An engineer-turned-entrepreneur helping small businesses survive and thrive with AI. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, famously said, "Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software." Somehow, most of the events in the artificial intelligence world are still happening behind the scenes. The end consumer's life is changing, but without them realizing it. The number of enterprise and B2B AI applications far exceeds direct consumer applications.


The Ultimate Guide to Setting Up Your Smart Home

#artificialintelligence

It's a place that anticipates your needs and empowers you to fine-tune your environment. Putting it all together isn't a smooth ride, but the right setup and combination of devices can make your life easier and add real convenience. With a myriad of ecosystems and standards to navigate, not to mention the diverse array of devices, the smart-home scene is daunting. We put together this smart-home guide to highlight your options, explain the jargon, and help you understand the consequences of the choices you make. A little planning goes a long way.