DPAs (Digital Personal Assistants) are running our lives after 29 years since the first virtual assistant was launched even if you think you're not using one. The integrating is there for all mobile devices and control how we manage our day to day lives without us evening noticing. Amazon Alexa Virtual Assistant or Alexa launched in 2014 and more than 100m of its Echo and Dot gadgets are available in homes around the world today. In five years, Alexa is topping the DPA market with 8.2 million users around the world and 61.1% of US market shares of smart speakers. Amazon is adding more and more features into Alexa, that is why it's the most intelligent of all assistants in the market.

Lutron makes one of our favorite motorized shades, but the company also offers motorized blinds. Window blinds are considered "hard" window coverings because they consist of slats--wooden, in this case--that drop down from the top of the window (or that slide left or right, in the case of vertical blinds). The motor mounted in the headrail of the Serena blinds tilts the 2-inch slats for privacy and light control. The accumulated weight of the slats, however, makes them too heavy for the motor to lift--even though Lutron fabricates the slats from a soft, fine-grained timber called North American basswood. If you want to fully expose the window, you will need to lift the blinds by hand and pull them back down to close.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the branch of computer science that enables machines to perform activities that up to now have required human know-how, such as image or speech recognition. Virtual assistants are probably the most familiar everyday manifestations of AI, and the big players in the AI field have their own avatars: Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, and Cortana (Microsoft). However, the impact of applied AI is now being felt, particularly across sectors such as health sciences. Here, AI-driven solutions automate and improve the efficiency of complex processes for the early detection of certain cancers and reduce the risks to patients in treatment programmes for those conditions. Spending on cognitive and AI systems worldwide is expected to more than quadruple by 2021, according to International Data Corporation.

Graph-based collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms have gained increasing attention. Existing work in this literature usually models the user-item interactions as a bipartite graph, where users and items are two isolated node sets and edges between them indicate their interactions. Then, the unobserved preference of users can be exploited by modeling high-order connectivity on the bipartite graph. In this work, we propose to model user-item interactions as a heterogeneous graph which consists of not only user-item edges indicating their interaction but also user-user edges indicating their similarity. We develop heterogeneous graph collaborative filtering (HGCF), a GCN-based framework which can explicitly capture both the interaction signal and similarity signal through embedding propagation on the heterogeneous graph. Since the heterogeneous graph is more connected than the bipartite graph, the sparsity issue can be alleviated and the demand for expensive high-order connectivity modeling can be lowered. Extensive experiments conducted on three public benchmarks demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-arts. Further analysis verifies the importance of user-user edges in the graph, justifying the rationality and effectiveness of HGCF.

The Arlo Pro 4 is a small but mighty outdoor home security camera. The Arlo Pro 4 Spotlight camera has higher video quality and better field of view than almost any camera we've tested--including the popular Nest Cam Outdoor. Other Arlo Pro 4 features include color night vision output, two-way talk capabilities, timely smart alerts, and easy integration with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. The Pro 4 is entirely wire-free and runs on a rechargeable battery that can last up to six months per charge. It also has a built-in spotlight that illuminates when motion is detected, and a smart siren that can be triggered automatically or remotely via the Arlo app.

Apple's HomePod was a bit of a tough sell when it launched in 2018. The $350 speaker (now selling for $300) was far more expensive than the Amazon Echo or Google Home, and Siri was less capable and intelligent than Alexa or Google Assistant. One thing was undeniable, though: the HomePod sounded excellent. It was first and foremost for music lovers, and things like smart home controls felt like an afterthought. The HomePod took its place as a niche product while the inexpensive Google Home Mini and Echo Dot gave Amazon and Google a commanding presence in the smart speaker space.

Apple's HomePod mini is finally here – the iPhone maker's attempt to break the Amazon Echo-Google Home duopoly and put itself back into the voice assistant race. The HomePod mini costs £99 and sits below the full-sized HomePod costing £279. The speaker looks like a smaller, more spherical version of the big HomePod from almost three years ago. The outside is covered in a recycled plastic fabric mesh and there is a touch-sensitive disc at the top with a coloured LED display that lights up and pulsates as you interact with its voice assistant, Siri. It is an attractive object that is smaller and less prominent than its primary competition, the equally new Amazon Echo and Google Nest Audio.

I listened to "Rhapsody in Blue" 36 times so I could tell you: Apple, Google and Amazon's new speakers, all released in the past few months, sound pretty dang good for their shelf-friendly size and $100 price tags. This year's focal points are audio quality and multiroom playback. The latest HomePod, Nest and Echo speakers still want to set your timers and take your song requests, but now they're stepping up their attempts to compete with Sonos, Bose, Sony and others.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced companies around the world to work remotely and change nearly everything about their work habits, and technology companies everywhere stepped up and met that challenge by accelerating what were already emerging technologies. Things like unified communications and collaboration, videoconferencing and cloud computing have skyrocketed since the start of the year, but another technology is becoming a part of our working lives at a rapid pace: artificial intelligence. "What happened in five years is now happening in five months," says Igor Jablokov, founder and CEO of augmented AI company Pryon and an early pioneer of automated cloud platforms for voice recognition that helped invent the technology that led to Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa. In an interview with My TechDecisions, Jablokov told us how artificial intelligence is being used in the enterprise market, how it will expand, and what the industry needs to do to continue fine tuning the technology. According to Jablokov, artificial intelligence isn't limited to the enterprise office environment.

Although a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Rosenfeld discovered that heterosexual couples are more likely to meet a romantic partner through personal contacts and connections, in the past decade, many couples met online. Finding love through online dating sites/apps has become an everyday reality. With hectic lifestyles and breathtaking life paces, people are reluctant to go out and look for an appropriate date due to the lack of time and safety measures caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, dating applications have become popular and handy in the COVID-19 scenario to search for a soulmate or date online. It's not surprising that dating app development is a real trend in today's scenario.