When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Is Windows' Copilot button doomed to the fate of the Cortana key? From Cortana to Windows Copilot, history says new shortcut keys rarely stick. When Microsoft's Copilot key first poofed into existence, I tilted my head and thought . Does anyone remember the Cortana key?

Generative AI (GenAI) offers new opportunities for customer support in online travel agencies, yet little is known about how its design influences user engagement, purchase behavior, and user experience. We report results from a randomized field experiment in online travel itinerary planning, comparing GenAI that expressed (A) positive enthusiasm, (B) neutral expression, and (C) no tone instructions (control). Users in group A wrote significantly longer prompts than those in groups B and C. At the same time, users in groups A and B were more likely to purchase subscriptions of the webservice. We further analyze linguistic cues across experimental groups to explore differences in user experience and explain subscription purchases and affiliate link clicks based on these cues. Our findings provide implications for the design of persuasive and engaging GenAI interfaces in consumer-facing contexts and contribute to understanding how linguistic framing shapes user behavior in AI-mediated decision support.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, from virtual assistants [Kepuska and Bohouta, 2018] to recommendation engines [Gomez-Uribe and Hunt, 2015] and autonomous vehicles [Shladover, 2018], has reshaped human-machine interaction. Y et, African languages, with over 2,000 spoken across the continent [Eberhard et al., 2023], remain severely underrepresented in NLP due to their low-resource status [Ahia and Boakye, 2023, Nekoto et al., 2020]. This exclusion risks exacerbating the digital divide, limiting access to AI-driven services in critical domains like education, healthcare, and governance [Ndichu et al., 2024, Joshi et al., 2020]. Shona, a Bantu language spoken by millions in Zimbabwe and southern Zambia, exemplifies this challenge. Existing Shona corpora primarily consist of formal texts, such as news articles or religious documents [Eberhard et al., 2023], while everyday communication, particularly among younger speakers, is dominated by slang, code-mixing with English, and informal expressions [Eisenstein, 2013]. Standard NLP models, trained on formal data, struggle to process these dynamic linguistic patterns, hindering the development of culturally relevant conversational AI.

The integration of various AI tools creates a complex socio-technical environment where employee-customer interactions form the core of work practices. This study investigates how customer service representatives (CSRs) at the power grid service customer service call center perceive AI assistance in their interactions with customers. Through a field visit and semi-structured interviews with 13 CSRs, we found that AI can alleviate some traditional burdens during the call (e.g., typing and memorizing) but also introduces new burdens (e.g., earning, compliance, psychological burdens). This research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of AI integration in organizational settings and highlights the efforts and burdens undertaken by CSRs to adapt to the updated system.

E-Commerce customer support requires quick and accurate answers grounded in product data and past support cases. This paper develops a novel retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that uses knowledge graphs (KGs) to improve the relevance of the answer and the factual grounding. We examine recent advances in knowledge-augmented RAG and chatbots based on large language models (LLM) in customer support, including Microsoft's GraphRAG and hybrid retrieval architectures. We then propose a new answer synthesis algorithm that combines structured subgraphs from a domain-specific KG with text documents retrieved from support archives, producing more coherent and grounded responses. We detail the architecture and knowledge flow of our system, provide comprehensive experimental evaluation, and justify its design in real-time support settings. Our implementation demonstrates 23\% improvement in factual accuracy and 89\% user satisfaction in e-Commerce QA scenarios.

The rapid advancement of generative AI technologies is driving the integration of diverse AI-powered services into smartphones, transforming how users interact with their devices. To simplify access to predefined AI services, this paper introduces MIRA, a pioneering framework for task instruction recommendation that enables intuitive one-touch AI tasking on smartphones. With MIRA, users can long-press on images or text objects to receive contextually relevant instruction recommendations for executing AI tasks. Our work introduces three key innovations: 1) A multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based recommendation pipeline with structured reasoning to extract key entities, infer user intent, and generate precise instructions; 2) A template-augmented reasoning mechanism that integrates high-level reasoning templates, enhancing task inference accuracy; 3) A prefix-tree-based constrained decoding strategy that restricts outputs to predefined instruction candidates, ensuring coherent and intent-aligned suggestions. Through evaluation using a real-world annotated datasets and a user study, MIRA has demonstrated substantial improvements in the accuracy of instruction recommendation. The encouraging results highlight MIRA's potential to revolutionize the way users engage with AI services on their smartphones, offering a more seamless and efficient experience.

This paper proposes the MT-DQN model, which integrates a Transformer, Temporal Graph Neural Network (TGNN), and Deep Q-Network (DQN) to address the challenges of predicting user behavior and optimizing recommendation strategies in short-video environments. Experiments demonstrated that MT-DQN consistently outperforms traditional concatenated models, such as Concat-Modal, achieving an average F1-score improvement of 10.97% and an average NDCG@5 improvement of 8.3%. Compared to the classic reinforcement learning model Vanilla-DQN, MT-DQN reduces MSE by 34.8% and MAE by 26.5%. Nonetheless, we also recognize challenges in deploying MT-DQN in real-world scenarios, such as its computational cost and latency sensitivity during online inference, which will be addressed through future architectural optimization.

In the era of rapid development of social media, social recommendation systems as hybrid recommendation systems have been widely applied. Existing methods capture interest similarity between users to filter out interest-irrelevant relations in social networks that inevitably decrease recommendation accuracy, however, limited research has a focus on the mutual influence of semantic information between the social network and the user-item interaction network for further improving social recommendation. To address these issues, we introduce a social \underline{r}ecommendation model with ro\underline{bu}st g\underline{r}aph denoisin\underline{g}-augmentation fusion and multi-s\underline{e}mantic Modeling(Burger). Specifically, we firstly propose to construct a social tensor in order to smooth the training process of the model. Then, a graph convolutional network and a tensor convolutional network are employed to capture user's item preference and social preference, respectively. Considering the different semantic information in the user-item interaction network and the social network, a bi-semantic coordination loss is proposed to model the mutual influence of semantic information. To alleviate the interference of interest-irrelevant relations on multi-semantic modeling, we further use Bayesian posterior probability to mine potential social relations to replace social noise. Finally, the sliding window mechanism is utilized to update the social tensor as the input for the next iteration. Extensive experiments on three real datasets show Burger has a superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art models.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Amazon's next-gen Echo and Kindle devices are almost here New Echo devices powered by Alexa+ are on the menu, including revamped Kindle hardware. Get ready for a parade of new Amazon devices--including Echo speakers powered by the new AI Alexa--at showcase in New York City later this month. The event is slated for September 30, and the timing puts Amazon back on track for its usual fall preview of its latest wares. Amazon skipped its typical fall event last year in favor of a smaller Kindle-only unveiling.

While optimizing recommendation systems for user engagement is a well-established practice, effectively diversifying recommendations without negatively impacting core business metrics remains a significant industry challenge. In line with our initiative to broaden our audience's cultural practices, this study investigates using personalized Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) to sample diverse and relevant recommendations. We rely on a well-known quality-diversity decomposition of the similarity kernel to give more weight to user preferences. In this paper, we present our implementations of the personalized DPP sampling, evaluate the trade-offs between relevance and diversity through both offline and online metrics, and give insights for practitioners on their use in a production environment. For the sake of reproducibility, we release the full code for our platform and experiments on GitHub.