Amazon's Alexa Guard Plus subscription service is now live in the US. The company unveiled Guard Plus back in September as a paid option for those who want the extra features that come with the premium version of its free Guard service. While the basic Guard feature can already turn Echo smart speakers and displays into home security devices, its premium version takes things a step further by giving subscribers hands-free access to emergency services and giving Alexa the power to deter intruders from breaking in. Customers who pay for a subscription will be able to ask Alexa to call Emergency Helpline for them to request medical, fire or police assistance. The service also gives Alexa the capability to detect sounds of activity in the house if its residents are away and to sound a siren from Echo devices if it does. Alexa could also play the sounds of dogs barking from the speakers if connected outdoor security cameras detect motion outside the door.

Five years ago, the world of artificial intelligence--and the algorithms it runs on--looked very different. Asking your Google Home to play Adele's chart-topping single wasn't possible yet. IBM Watson was still widely considered a beacon for AI advancement, and DeepMind's AI victory over a human at Go was still fresh. Machine learning engineers were facing earlier versions of today's image classification and speech recognition challenges. And though most tech giants hadn't earmarked corporate funding for ethical AI, the conversation was becoming more mainstream as the impact of algorithms on human lives became clearer.

Sony's top of the line noise-cancelling headphones have long had a winning formula and the latest edition has a much-requested addition – multiple device connectivity – to make them the best of class. The WH-1000XM4 have an RRP of £350 and on initial inspection little has changed for the fourth edition of the 1000X line, with its understated design. The high-quality plastic body is well made and lightweight at 254g but doesn't feel as premium as some metal or carbon fibre competitors that weigh more than 300g. They are some of the lightest-feeling headphones you can buy, matching the longstanding comfort kings, the Bose QC35 II. The ear cups are well padded with a gentle, even pressure on the side of your head while a soft leatherette headband sits on your dome.

Textual explanations have proved to help improve user satisfaction on machine-made recommendations. However, current mainstream solutions loosely connect the learning of explanation with the learning of recommendation: for example, they are often separately modeled as rating prediction and content generation tasks. In this work, we propose to strengthen their connection by enforcing the idea of sentiment alignment between a recommendation and its corresponding explanation. At training time, the two learning tasks are joined by a latent sentiment vector, which is encoded by the recommendation module and used to make word choices for explanation generation. At both training and inference time, the explanation module is required to generate explanation text that matches sentiment predicted by the recommendation module. Extensive experiments demonstrate our solution outperforms a rich set of baselines in both recommendation and explanation tasks, especially on the improved quality of its generated explanations. More importantly, our user studies confirm our generated explanations help users better recognize the differences between recommended items and understand why an item is recommended.

A group of more than 30 democratic lawmakers led by Representatives Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) and Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA) are calling on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to make substantive changes to their recommendation algorithms. In three separate letters addressed to the CEOs of those companies, the group makes a direct link to the January 6th US Capitol attack and the part those platforms played in radicalizing the individuals who took part in the uprising. "On Wednesday, January 6th the United States Capitol was attacked by a violent, insurrectionist mob radicalized in part in a digital echo chamber that your company designed, built and maintained," the letter addressed to Google and YouTube CEOs Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki says. A letter from some Congress members to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki flexes research on how YouTube's algorithms have promoted conspiracy theories and political extremism. Citing the Capitol attacks, they request changes to its recommendations systems.

This week brought a return of some holiday sale prices, plus a few deals that are even better than those we saw late last year. Google's Pixel 4a 5G fell to a new record-low price, while the 8th-generation iPad remains on sale for $299. If you want to up your smart-home game, August's WiFi smart lock is more than $65 off and some Beats headphones are 50 percent off, too. Here are the best deals from this week that you can still get today. One of Google's newest smartphones, the Pixel 4a 5G is down to $459, or $40 off its normal price.

Q Acoustics builds mighty-fine loudspeakers, and for its first self-powered offering, the company could have modified any of its existing designs by bolting on an amplifier and calling it a day. What it has wrought instead is a complete high-end audio system that can accommodate nearly any source: analog or digital, wired or wireless, streaming or locally sourced; one that can be incorporated into any of the most common home-audio and smart-home ecosystems. The Q Active 200 system consists of a pair of self-amplified, wireless two-way bookshelf speakers and the Q Active Control Hub (the company will soon offer the same technology in a tower speaker system, the Q Active 400). The broad range of audio sources the Hub can handle range from a server on your network, to most of the popular streaming services, to a turntable equipped with a moving-magnet cartridge. It can then send that music both to its own speakers and to other audio systems on your network, using Apple AirPlay 2 or Google Chromecast.

Google is giving users a new way to take charge over their privacy when using its smart speakers and displays. The new security feature, known as Guest Mode, keeps your personal data confidential while still allowing others to get the most out of Google Assistant--and it's already available on your Google smart speaker. Guest Mode is a new privacy feature for Google smart speakers that, when enabled, doesn't store assistant activity and audio recordings, or provide personalized results. The new feature, announced on Jan. 13, is ready for use on Google speakers and displays like the Google Nest Mini and Nest Hub Max. To turn it on, say, "Hey Google, turn on Guest Mode."

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Dating is about to get political again. After briefly disabling the feature, Bumble is reportedly allowing users to once again filter matches based on their political stance. This option was temporarily disabled following the riot at the U.S. Capitol "to prevent misuse," Bumble previously said.

If you're listening to music right now, chances are you didn't choose what to put on--you outsourced it to an algorithm. Such is the popularity of recommendation systems that we've come to rely on them to serve us what we want without us even having to ask, with music streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, and Deezer all using personalized systems to suggest playlists or tracks tailored to the user. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Generally, these systems are very good. The problem, for some, is that they're perhaps really too good.