One in 5 Americans surveyed say they own an Amazon Echo smart speaker (from $39), supported by new data published by Trading Platforms, a leading education and comparison platform for online traders. This is consistent with Edison Research and NPR's Smart Audio Report findings. Google Nest is its next closest competitor with roughly 8 percent of the U.S. market share, according to Trading Platforms. Considering how many of us are confined to our homes because of COVID-19, we may be using these devices more, too. "Before the pandemic, most people used their smart speakers for getting the weather and listening to music. But over the past year, they've become our meditation guides and yoga teachers, our homework helpers and bedtime story readers, the way we discover new recipes and local takeout spots – and so much more," says Katherine Prescott, Founder and Editor of VoiceBrew, which distributes an email newsletter devoted to smart speakers, Monday through Thursday.

The traditional process of building interactive machine learning systems can be viewed as a teacher-learner interaction scenario where the machine-learners are trained by one or more human-teachers. In this work, we explore the idea of using a conversational interface to investigate the interaction between human-teachers and interactive machine-learners. Specifically, we examine whether teachable AI agents can reliably learn from human-teachers through conversational interactions, and how this learning compare with traditional supervised learning algorithms. Results validate the concept of teachable conversational agents and highlight the factors relevant for the development of machine learning systems that intend to learn from conversational interactions.

Google and Apple are following through on their promise to play nice with each other. After announcing in December that the Apple TV app would come to Chromecasts with Google TV, the companies have shared today that the service is now globally available. With the integration, you'll not only be able to use Apple's app from your Chromecast's interface, but you can also access your purchased films and shows, as well as personalized suggestions without having to cast your iPhone to the TV. In the US, Google TV users will see Apple Originals in their personalized recommendations and search results. You'll also be able to ask the Google Assistant to open the Apple app or play one of its exclusive titles.

"We are investigating the case for publishing or circulating any statement, rumour or report with intent to cause fear or alarm to the public, sharing offensive or menacing content, and prostitution," police chief Fadzil Ahmat said according to the Straits Times website.

Eufy's G30 Hybrid brings together vacuuming and mopping capabilities in one modestly priced robot. As with most hybrids, it's a better robot vacuum than a robot mop, but when you consider it also comes with smart navigation, app control, and Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice-command support, it's a great value at $370. The G30 Hybrid is a super-svelte 12.8 x 12.8 x 2.85 inches. Not surprisingly, it looks very much like the Eufy G30 Edge we reviewed last year. There's a trio of physical buttons on top--start/pause Auto cleaning, spot cleaning, and recharge--along with a Wi-Fi status light/power switch on the side.

Most existing personalization systems promote items that match a user's previous choices or those that are popular among similar users. This results in recommendations that are highly similar to the ones users are already exposed to, resulting in their isolation inside familiar but insulated information silos. In this context, we develop a novel recommendation framework with a goal of improving information diversity using a modified random walk exploration of the user-item graph. We focus on the problem of political content recommendation, while addressing a general problem applicable to personalization tasks in other social and information networks. For recommending political content on social networks, we first propose a new model to estimate the ideological positions for both users and the content they share, which is able to recover ideological positions with high accuracy. Based on these estimated positions, we generate diversified personalized recommendations using our new random-walk based recommendation algorithm. With experimental evaluations on large datasets of Twitter discussions, we show that our method based on \emph{random walks with erasure} is able to generate more ideologically diverse recommendations. Our approach does not depend on the availability of labels regarding the bias of users or content producers. With experiments on open benchmark datasets from other social and information networks, we also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in recommending diverse long-tail items.

Amazon announced its "Day 1" hardware program last year as a way to build unusual hardware products in limited quantities, get feedback from users and eventually make them more widely available. In fact, Amazon's Echo Frames are the first bit of hardware to "graduate" from Day 1 to general availability. Now, the company is expanding Day 1 with a new program called "Built It." Like Day 1, Built It features some unconventional devices, but it's directly taking consumer interest into account when deciding whether to sell the products at all in a way that's similar to what Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been doing. The first three Built It products -- a cuckoo clock, smart nutrition scale and sticky note printer -- were announced today. You can order them now, but Amazon will only make them if they hit a sales goal by March 19th.

Amazon is making it a little easier to get started with a smart home. The internet giant is selling a bundle that pairs the latest-generation Echo with two Philips Hue white light bulbs for $80 -- a full $50 below the official asking price. And when the Echo includes its own Zigbee hub, you won't need to buy any additional bridges to get started. It's not the absolute lowest price we've seen for this combo (it has dipped as low as $70), but we haven't seen a discount this sizeable for months. The Echo may look like a light-up snow globe, but that's about the only significant quirk.

Doesn't work with existing chimes Everything you need to install the Ring Video Doorbell Wired, including mounting hardware, is included with your purchase. Here are the Ring Video Doorbell Wired's specs: It also offers two-way talk with noise cancellation, night vision, and Amazon Alexa integration. The doorbell detects motion and sends smart push notifications to your phone when someone is at the front door. Within the Ring app, you can view a live stream of your doorbell camera, create custom motion zones, and finetune your privacy settings. Installation takes about 15 minutes, and existing doorbell wiring is necessary.

The knowledge engineering bottleneck is still a major challenge in configurator projects. In this paper we show how recommender systems can support knowledge base development and maintenance processes. We discuss a couple of scenarios for the application of recommender systems in knowledge engineering and report the results of empirical studies which show the importance of user-centered configuration knowledge organization.