Purchases you make through our links may earn us a commission. If you ask us, Mondays are always a bit of a slog. If you're in the mood for a little distraction (or just feel like giving your debit card a little well-deserved exercise), you can head over to Amazon. The e-commerce giant is always slashing prices on all kinds of highly rated product gems, and today is no exception. Get expert shopping advice delivered to your phone.

The Google Home Mini, like the Amazon Echo Dot, really started the smart speaker revolution -- and while the Google Home Mini launched in 2016, it's still humming along with more smarts than ever before. Right now at StackSocial the Google Home Mini is just $19.99 -- nearly 60% off its original $49.95 price tag. The big appeal of the Home Mini is adding the Google Assistant to your room. You can ask for your favorite music, a trivia game show to entertain the children and even questions. The assistant knows how far Earth is from the sun and the weather in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, alike.

TP-Link has today announced an updated version of its Deco mesh networking gear that now has voice control, through Amazon Alexa. The Deco Voice X20 packs in a smart speaker in every satellite point that enables users to control the smart parts of their home without buying more Echo Dots. The two pack you can buy at retail is said to cover 4,000 square feet in WiFi 6, with truly "seamless roaming." The hardware is pretty interesting to look at, too, with a white cylinder floating on a hot-rod red base. Mesh networks rely upon gadgets being strewn around your home in prominent places, not hidden behind cupboards. In order to encourage this, device makers have both made their gear look better, but also do more to ensure that they find a place in your heart.

In this work we present an explainable system for emotion attribution and recommendation (called DEGARI) relying on a recently introduced commonsense reasoning framework (the TCL logic) which is based on a human-like procedure for the automatic generation of novel concepts in a Description Logics knowledge base. Starting from an ontological formalization of emotions (known as ArsEmotica), the system exploits the logic TCL to automatically generate novel commonsense semantic representations of compound emotions (e.g. Love as derived from the combination of Joy and Trust according to the ArsEmotica model). The generated emotions correspond to prototypes, i.e. commonsense representations of given concepts, and have been used to reclassify emotion-related contents in a variety of artistic domains, ranging from art datasets to the editorial content available in RaiPlay, the online multimedia platform of RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana (the Italian public broadcasting company). We have tested our system (1) by reclassifying the available contents in the tested dataset with respect to the new generated compound emotions (2) with an evaluation, in the form of a controlled user study experiment, of the feasibility of using the obtained reclassifications as recommended emotional content. The obtained results are encouraging and pave the way to many possible further improvements and research directions.

Amazon is making it easier to remember an event you don't want to miss. The Verge reports that Amazon has quietly introduced a hinted-at "tell me when" Alexa command that not only answers your question about an event, but sets a reminder when that event happens. If you ask Alexa to "tell me when the Super Bowl is," your Echo or a similar device will both answer the question (February 7th, 2021, for the record) and alert you that day. You can also use "tell me when" for things like TV show air dates, holidays, or emails from contacts. The feature is only available for Alexa users in the US at present.

It's been a busy few weeks here at Engadget. In addition to celebrating the holidays, ringing in the New Year and prepping for next week's virtual CES, we've kept reviewing all the new gadgets and components that we can get our hands on. We start off with the long-awaited Apple AirPods Max headphones and, more recently, the Amazon Echo Frames which are now finally available. We also checked out Sony's portable A7C camera, HP's Reverb G2 mixed reality headset, NVIDIA's RTX 3060 Ti and the flexible Hologram Electronics Microcosm effects pedal. Long-rumored and quietly revealed last month, the AirPods Max are high-end, over-ear headphones constructed from aluminum and metal and available in five colors.

Users install many apps on their smartphones, raising issues related to information overload for users and resource management for devices. Moreover, the recent increase in the use of personal assistants has made mobile devices even more pervasive in users' lives. This paper addresses two research problems that are vital for developing effective personal mobile assistants: target apps selection and recommendation. The former is the key component of a unified mobile search system: a system that addresses the users' information needs for all the apps installed on their devices with a unified mode of access. The latter, instead, predicts the next apps that the users would want to launch. Here we focus on context-aware models to leverage the rich contextual information available to mobile devices. We design an in situ study to collect thousands of mobile queries enriched with mobile sensor data (now publicly available for research purposes). With the aid of this dataset, we study the user behavior in the context of these tasks and propose a family of context-aware neural models that take into account the sequential, temporal, and personal behavior of users. We study several state-of-the-art models and show that the proposed models significantly outperform the baselines.

Providing personalized explanations for recommendations can help users to understand the underlying insight of the recommendation results, which is helpful to the effectiveness, transparency, persuasiveness and trustworthiness of recommender systems. Current explainable recommendation models mostly generate textual explanations based on pre-defined sentence templates. However, the expressiveness power of template-based explanation sentences are limited to the pre-defined expressions, and manually defining the expressions require significant human efforts. Motivated by this problem, we propose to generate free-text natural language explanations for personalized recommendation. In particular, we propose a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence model (HSS) for personalized explanation generation. Different from conventional sentence generation in NLP research, a great challenge of explanation generation in e-commerce recommendation is that not all sentences in user reviews are of explanation purpose. To solve the problem, we further propose an auto-denoising mechanism based on topical item feature words for sentence generation. Experiments on various e-commerce product domains show that our approach can not only improve the recommendation accuracy, but also the explanation quality in terms of the offline measures and feature words coverage. This research is one of the initial steps to grant intelligent agents with the ability to explain itself based on natural language sentences.

Earlier today, Sony announced plans to expand its 360 Reality Audio platform. The key updates were a two-fold approach for expanding the limited content library, licensing tech to other companies and -- most importantly -- news that it would ship its own speakers built for the immersive sound this spring. At the time, the company said it didn't have any info beyond a few vague details, but that's wasn't entirely true. Sony's UK website has already posted full details for both the SRS-RA5000 and SRS-RA3000 "premium wireless speakers." If you've been following our 360 Reality Audio coverage since 2019, you'll recognize the designs.

Beijing – Browsing the internet as a young policeman in China, Ma Baoli recalls the sheer volume of web pages telling him he was a pervert, diseased and in need of treatment -- simply because he is gay. "I felt extremely lonely after I became aware of my sexual orientation," says Ma, at the time a newly minted officer in a small coastal city. Two decades later, the softly spoken 43-year-old now helms Blued, one of the world's largest dating platforms for gay men. The app went public last July with an $85 million debut on Nasdaq, a remarkable tech success story from a country that classified homosexuality as a mental illness as recently as 2001. Parent company BlueCity's sunlit Beijing campus teems with young and casually dressed programmers who hold meetings in rooms named after Oscar Wilde and other prominent LGBTQ figures from around the world.