You might not have to depend on Google Podcasts if you're asking Assistant to play your favorite serialized audio show. Android Police and its readers have discovered that Google is adding support for third-party podcast services, starting with Spotify. You just have to visit podcast settings in Assistant to choose your provider. We've asked Google if it can comment on the feature's rollout. AP's writer had trouble getting it to work, though it may be due to regional issues.

Voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri will become common in children's bedrooms, according to a new report from Internet Matters, the online safety body, which says it is critical for parents to spend more time understanding new technology. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of new technology at home by "three or four years", the researchers said, and families in the UK will become much more reliant on voice-enabled devices over the next five years. The report's author, Lynne Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Sunderland, said we would even see the emergence of a range of celebrity voice assistants. "You'd have Elsa from Frozen," Hall said. "You can imagine that with every Disney film that came out there would be a new voice skin."

Google promised an Assistant driving mode for phones would arrive in mid-2019, but that clearly didn't happen -- over a year passed without any sign of it. It appears to be ready, though. XDA-Developers has discovered (via Android Police) that Google Assistant's driving mode is at least partially enabled for Android users. The interface has changed considerably from the I/O 2019 demo you see above, but the concept remains the same with large buttons and text that let you chat, message and play music while keeping your driving distractions to a minimum. The rollout appears to be server-side, and might be part of a test.

Have you ever watched a video or movie because YouTube or Netflix recommended it to you? Or added a friend on Facebook from the list of "people you may know"? And how does Twitter decide which tweets to show you at the top of your feed? These platforms are driven by algorithms, which rank and recommend content for us based on our data. If you want to know when social media companies are trying to manipulate you into disclosing information or engaging more, the answer is always.

Amazon Echo can make your life easier. Amazon's Echo line is the reigning champ of the smart speaker world. Compared to virtual assistants like Google and Siri, Alexa works with far more gadgets and responds to significantly more commands than the competition. Plus, Echo devices are pretty inexpensive, starting around $25 for the Flex and $30 for the Dot when you catch it on sale. I bought six of these Echo Shows for Christmas presents.

Counterfactual learning for dealing with missing-not-at-random data (MNAR) is an intriguing topic in the recommendation literature since MNAR data are ubiquitous in modern recommender systems. Missing-at-random (MAR) data, namely randomized controlled trials (RCTs), are usually required by most previous counterfactual learning methods for debiasing learning. However, the execution of RCTs is extraordinarily expensive in practice. To circumvent the use of RCTs, we build an information-theoretic counterfactual variational information bottleneck (CVIB), as an alternative for debiasing learning without RCTs. By separating the task-aware mutual information term in the original information bottleneck Lagrangian into factual and counterfactual parts, we derive a contrastive information loss and an additional output confidence penalty, which facilitates balanced learning between the factual and counterfactual domains. Empirical evaluation on real-world datasets shows that our CVIB significantly enhances both shallow and deep models, which sheds light on counterfactual learning in recommendation that goes beyond RCTs.

Despite all the excitement around innovations in fintech, larger and more traditional financial institutions are typically a little bit slower to adopt due to their complexity and size. Particularly with artificial intelligence, traditional financial services have always been eager to capture its potential but sluggish to fully implement. However, this has changed rapidly due to the onset of COVID-19. In the past few months, there has been over a 200% increase in mobile banking registrations and an 85% increase in mobile banking activity. This is a trend that is unlikely to change soon.

OneZero's General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week. Like every big tech company, Apple is in dire need of A.I. programmers. These algorithms serve as a foundation for everything from processing photos to make them look brighter and sharper to powering Siri to maybe even driving that Apple car. So, in 2016, the company hired a well-known Carnegie Mellon professor named Ruslan Salakhutdinov to lead its A.I. division and, in a surprising move by the typically tight-lipped company, launched a research blog to publish some of its own work. Apple makes some of its work public because the backbone of the A.I. field is still academic, and the ability to publish new research is a primary consideration for PhDs entering the world of tech.

The 2020 election is said to be'the most important election in our lifetime' and Google wants to help the 150 million Americans projected to vote get to the polls. The tech giant has rolled out new tools to Search and Maps that shows exact locations for in person voting and ballot drop boxes. When users look up information for'early voting' or'ballot drop boxes near me,' they will be shown details for specific places, along with hours of operation. The tech giant also announced its virtual assistant will'soon' be able to provide citizens with information - with just saying, 'Hey Google, where can I vote?' Google has rolled out new tools to Search and Maps that shows exact locations for in person voting and ballot drop boxes. Yunhan Xu, Google product manager, shared in the announcement: 'This year, searches for'how to vote' in the U.S. are higher than ever before.

Google has launched a new feature for its smart voice'Assistant' that lets you identify a song by simply humming, whistling or singing the tune. The feature, which is available on smartphones and smart speakers that use Google Assistant, uses machine learning to identify potential song matches. Users just need to tap the microphone on the search bar on the Google Assistant app and say'what's this song' or address their smart speakers by saying'Hey Google, what's this song?' before reciting it to the best of their ability. Without lyrics or even a perfect-pitch performance, the new tool will return potential matches and help the user identify the song that's been stuck in their head. In MailOnline's tests, the technology successfully identified 60 per cent of the songs hummed, sang or whistled into the Google Assistant mobile app.