Amazon Prime Day was the unofficial start to the holiday shopping season, and if you're tired of scrolling your phone for things to buy, don't worry. You can get everything you need using Amazon Alexa voice shopping to buy the best gifts for everyone on your list. Alexa voice shopping is an amazing service that lets you find and buy products on Amazon's website without doing any real work. Here's how to use it. From a smart screen to a smartphone, there are plenty of ways you can get your holiday shopping done with the help of Amazon Alexa.

The revamped, fourth-generation Echo Dot has arrived, and it comes with a spherical design that sets it well apart from its smaller, flatter predecessors. But while it boasts an all-new look, the latest Echo Dot is essentially the same speaker as the (now steeply discounted) third-gen Dot, complete with onboard Alexa, stellar smart home capabilities, impressive communication features, and the ability to keep an ear on your home via Alexa Guard. And while we're pleased with how the new Dot sounds, its front-firing driver doesn't deliver a quantum leap over the older Dot's audio quality. So yes, the fourth-gen Echo Dot is technically the best Dot yet, but only by a narrow margin. Available in charcoal, glacier white, and twilight blue flavors, the fourth-gen Echo Dot marks a major departure in terms of the speaker's look and feel.

Users around the world can now use Google's Assistant to play and control Spotify podcasts in English, Spotify has confirmed to Engadget. Until now, the voice assistant has only supported its own Google Podcasts, with third-party services limited to music streaming only. However, recent rumors suggested that the third-party podcast support was coming, starting with Spotify. You can enable the feature by heading to your Assistant device's settings in the Google Home app (on a smartphone or tablet) and choosing Spotify as the default podcast provider. You'll be able to find more information here from Spotify once the news post goes live.

Remember Facebook's automated personal assistant, M, that was released in a bid to compete with Alexa and Siri? After a series of embarrassing mishaps due to poorly trained algorithms, Facebook abruptly pulled the plug. They weren't alone; chatbots are infamous for putting their metaphorical feet in their mouths. While these debacles are tough to watch, the underlying problem is not artificial intelligence (AI) itself. AI succeeds when underpinned with sound strategy and well-trained models.

Introductory hands-on courses such as our smartphone-based coding courses, SuaCode require a lot of support for students to accomplish learning goals. Online environments make it even more difficult to get assistance especially more recently because of COVID-19. Given the multilingual context of our students (learners across 38 African countries), in this work, we developed an AI Teaching Assistant (Kwame) that provides answers to students' coding questions from our SuaCode courses in English and French. Kwame is a Sentence-BERT(SBERT)-based question-answering (QA) system that we trained and evaluated using question-answer pairs created from our course's quizzes and students' questions in past cohorts. It finds the paragraph most semantically similar to the question via cosine similarity. We compared the system with TF-IDF and Universal Sentence Encoder. Our results showed that SBERT performed the worst for the duration of 6 secs per question but the best for accuracy and fine-tuning on our course data improved the result.

It names smartwatches, TVs and connected cars, but voice searches are one of the fastest growing search areas right now. Most people are familiar with Amazon's Alexa's voice-assistant, which lets you ask questions instead of typing them in. Amazon is still the market leader in the smart speaker market, followed by Google with Apple trailing in third place. But those voice assistants are gaining users outside of speakers. Google's Assistant, for example, is already built into other products like Android and smartwatches as the default voice interface.

Apple has rolled out HomePod Software 14.1, adding intercom functionality and a handful of other updates to its devices a month before the launch of the HomePod Mini. The 14.1 update allows the speakers to work as an intercom system, sending announcements to other HomePods in the house. Messages can be sent to specific rooms or zones on your network. Today's update also brings new Siri features to HomePod, including the ability to stop alarms, timers and media across devices. Siri suggestions will now appear in Maps after asking HomePod about a location, and search results can be sent from the HomePod to your iPhone. Podcasts are getting voice recognition support for multiple users as well.

Google's influence in our lives is overwhelming, which is perhaps one of the reasons the Department of Justice and several state attorney generals banded together to file an anti-trust lawsuit against the company. But just how wide is Google's reach? We decided to take a look, and the results may surprise you. Start with the fact that Google ads are all over the Internet, and despite the initial stated goal of "organizing the world's information," the Alphabet unit is designed to have more ads appear, to keep the earnings up. In its most recent earnings, Alphabet reported $38.30 billion for Google.

People using dating apps to'hook up' are more likely to have a sexually transmitted infection and not use protection than those who meet in other ways, a study finds. The increasing popularity of dating apps means that finding a new sexual partner is as easy as a few swipes on a screen – but researchers found this comes with risks. A team from the Public Health Agency of Sweden surveyed more than 14,500 men and women aged 16 to 84 about the sexual behaviour, online dating and health. They didn't ask which apps or services people used, but found those turning to digital dating tools were more likely to have an STI and less likely to use a condom. People using dating apps to'hook up' are more likely to have a sexually transmitted infection and not use protection than those who meet in other ways, study finds.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the semiconductor equivalent of software -- pervasive, intangible, and capable of transforming the fiber of society and business. It is integrated into a growing number of applications and systems today in a manner that is both seamless and transformational. From Amazon's Alexa to self-driving vehicles, the development of AI has been revolutionary to the point that it seems to mimic human features, intelligence, and behavior. Although experts and scientists have warned against the dangers and hazards associated with highly mature AI machines, the market is expected to expand rapidly. According to Forbes, AI is a strategic priority of 83% of businesses today and is expected to drive global sales from nearly $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion by 2020.