When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. I spent two months with the Echo Dot Max after many years with the Echo Dot. Here's who should trade up, and who should stand pat. Built for Alexa+ and packed with smart features, the Amazon Echo Dot Max makes for a solid smart-home foundation, but that doesn't mean every Echo Dot owner should automatically move up to it. The first wave of "made for Alexa+" devices has arrived, and among them is Amazon's flagship Echo speaker--the Echo Dot Max, the successor to the earlier, fourth-generation Amazon Echo speaker.

Alexa.com brings Amazon's voice assistant to web browsers with meal planning, smart home controls and cross-device continuity for typing-based interactions.

How to Do It I'm Trying to Be Discreet on a Dating Site. My partner and I (man and woman in our mid-30s) want to open profiles on an adult dating site (Feeld, probably?) to connect with couples and singles. We've had ethically non-monogamous encounters at adult resorts, but haven't tried a dating site to meet people closer to home in hopes of landing on more "social swinging" relationships. There are a wealth of swinging/lifestyle podcasts with episodes about dating profiles, and omitting your face from "public" photos on the site (that is, visible to all members) is uniform advice. Of course, most often this is to avoid being identified on the site.

Apple's Siri AI will be powered by Gemini The projector offers inky blacks, high color accuracy and anti-rainbow tech, but costs a lot more than its rivals. After a widely hyped and successful Kickstarter campaign, Valerion's 4K VisionMaster Max laser projector has finally arrived. However, it's quite expensive and has some stiff competition from Anker's Nebula X1 and XGIMI's Horizon 20 Max. I was eager to see how it compared to those models and if it delivers on Valerion's promise of "pure cinema." It does offer better image quality, but the difference isn't quite enough to justify the big jump in price for most users. Valerion's VisionMaster Max delivers outstanding image quality thanks to its triple-laser system and dynamic iris.

We study the multinomial logit (MNL) contextual bandit problem for sequential assortment selection. Although most existing research assumes utility functions to be linear in item features, this linearity assumption restricts the modeling of intricate interactions between items and user preferences. A recent work (Zhang & Luo, 2024) has investigated general utility function classes, yet its method faces fundamental trade-offs between computational tractability and statistical efficiency. To address this limitation, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm for MNL contextual bandits leveraging the upper confidence bound principle, specifically designed for non-linear parametric utility functions, including those modeled by neural networks. Under a realizability assumption and a mild geometric condition on the utility function class, our algorithm achieves a regret bound of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$, where $T$ denotes the total number of rounds. Our result establishes that sharp $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$-regret is attainable even with neural network-based utilities, without relying on strong assumptions such as neural tangent kernel approximations. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed method is the first computationally tractable algorithm for MNL contextual bandits with non-linear utilities that provably attains $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret. Comprehensive numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, showing robust performance not only in realizable settings but also in scenarios with model misspecification.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. There's barely a mention in Samsung's press kit, but booth attendants assured us Music Studio 5 & 7 speakers support Alexa, Google Assistant, and Bixby. Samsung has dabbled in the smart speaker space before, but the company's all-new Music Studio 5 and Music Studio 7 Wi-Fi speakers pose serious competition for the likes of Amazon, Apple, Bose, and Sonos--at least at the higher-end of the market. Unveiled this week at CES and planned for a March release, both models present a distinctively modern, "dot-faced" industrial design by noted French artist Erwan Bouroullec, along with some equally interesting features destined to set them apart from the pack. Initial shipments will be in black or white only.)

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. From smart locks powered by light waves to a robot lawn mower that can pick fruit, these are the coolest new smart products we saw in Las Vegas this year. The latest edition of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is already drawing to a close, and once again, we've seen some truly impressive smart home and home security innovations--and as usual, some are more likely to ship than others. We're not counting on the robot lawn mower that picks fruit and lobs tennis balls to canines to actually land in stores, but it certainly counts as one of the biggest attention-getters in Vegas this week. We also saw some far more practical smart products that wowed us, from the smart lock that's powered by light waves to the new go-almost-anywhere Ring sensors that connect to Amazon's growing patchwork of Sidewalk neighborhood networks.

When everyone looks too perfect to trust, weirdness becomes the most convincing sign you're real. If my dating app profile were made with A.I., my nose would be smaller, my teeth whiter. My eyes would be equally hooded, or not hooded at all, and my skin smoother. Men wouldn't make a game out of guessing whether I'm neurodivergent or Jewish. My gaze would be coquettish, my aura obvious, my entire essence ratcheted down a notch or several.

A screenshot of Loverse app shows an AI-generated woman, characterized as a 25-year-old hair and makeup artist Miyu, registered as a female companion. When artificial intelligence first started receiving attention around the end of 2022, Goki Kusunoki was tinkering around to see what kind of services he could create with the technology. One thing clicked for him after he created an image of an attractive woman with AI -- an AI companion -- and wondered what it would be like to engage in a conversation with her. "As I kept talking with her, I found that the conversations were more enjoyable than I had expected and as the exchanges continued, my feelings gradually grew -- at some point I caught myself thinking, 'I might actually like her,'" he recounted. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Qira will arrive later this quarter. If the world didn't already have one too many digital assistants, Lenovo is adding another one to the pile. On Tuesday evening, the company announced Qira, a cross-device AI for both its own computers and Motorola smartphones. Set to arrive later this quarter, it will live at the system level of Lenovo devices. Users won't need to open or switch to the assistant.