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 Personal Assistant Systems


Alexa's Auto Mode turns your phone into a 'driver-friendly' display

Engadget

Amazon wants to make it safer and easier to use your phone while you're in the car. The feature turns your phone into a "driver-friendly" display with large touch targets and easy-to-read visuals. Auto Mode keeps things simple with four screens: Home, Navigation, Communicate and Play. The home screen includes shortcuts to pause or play your media source, navigate to home or work and make a call. The Navigation screen lets you create shortcuts for favorite locations, or if you ask Alexa to find someplace new, Auto Mode will display a simplified results list with only the most relevant info.


Amazon Smart Plug vs Currant: Which is the best?

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

All smart plugs have the same primary purpose: transforming plug-in electronics into remote-controlled devices. However, that doesn't mean all smart plugs are the same. How well they perform can make a big difference as to how useful they are in your daily life. We're comparing the wildly popular Amazon Smart Plug against our favorite smart plug on the market, the Currant WiFi Smart Outlet to see how they stack up in a number of categories. Read on to find out which smart plug is right for you.


Google launches AI secretary that waits on hold for phone users

The Guardian

Hold music could one day be a thing of the past, thanks to a service coming to Google's smartphones. "Hold For Me", which launches on Thursday in the US for owners of Google's Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a phones, involves Google's AI tools taking over as an automatic secretary when on hold to a call centre, leaving the user free to put the phone down and carry on with their life. The service will automatically listen out for when the call is picked up, and send a notification when it's time for the user to get back on the phone. In the meantime, Google's assistant will ask the call centre to hold, hopefully stopping them from hanging up because of dead air. "Every business's hold loop is different and simple algorithms can't accurately detect when a customer support representative comes on to the call," Google's Andrew Goodman and Joseph Cherukara said.


13 Best Artificial Intelligence (AI) Apps For Android

#artificialintelligence

Mobile applications have laid the cornerstone in the industry, and the advancement of technology along with science has graveled the road for artificial intelligence apps. Thus, Application Development with game-changing Artificial Intelligence has produced significant growth in the market. Bridging the gap between humans and machines, the emergence of AI technology, and now the AI applications have expanded its horizons in every field. While AI is the point of discussion in the mobile industry, the terms "OK google or SIRI" are not new to the mobile phone users. From reading emails, online shopping, to making phone calls, these virtual assisting apps have been simplifying the lives of users for many years now. But, the implementation of AI is not limited to these voice command apps, it has crossed the clouds of imagination.


Why Chromecast is the most interesting of Google's new products

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

For the past several years, two of the hottest products during the holidays have been low-cost streaming devices from Amazon and Roku, often discounted down to around $25 for end of the year sales. And often left out of the party was Google, which first launched its own unit in 2013, Chromecast, initially selling for $35, a product aimed at early adopters and serious tech nerds. Which is why Google's announcement Wednesday of a new $49.99 Chromecast (available by Oct. 15) was hands down the most interesting of its presentation, and the one most likely to end up in more consumers homes. Also announced were two new smartphones ($499 and $699) and a redesigned Google Home smart speaker with better sound, selling for $99. Help:Blur your home on Maps and erase your data to remove your life from Google's grip With the new Chromecast, Google can now compete in streaming effectively on the same playing field as Amazon and Roku, which each tout having 40 million customers each for their streaming services.


10 amazing ways a laptop can change your life

#artificialintelligence

Looking at your humble laptop, you may not think it has the power to change your life. But there are so many amazing things you can do on a portable computer, and many of them can help you do more than you could ever imagine. In this article we'll look at some of the ways your trusty laptop can open new avenues in your life, from getting you that dream job to keeping your prized keepsakes safe for good. If you live far away from friends and family, that does not mean you cannot stay in touch. Thanks to your laptop's built-in webcam and an app like Skype, you can have a video call with loved ones wherever they are.


Tensorflow Releases New Package For Recommendation Systems: TFRS

#artificialintelligence

From Amazon to Netflix to Pinterest, recommendation systems are the cornerstone of a majority of the modern-day billion-dollar industries. However, building recommender systems is not a straightforward task. What if we can build them in a few lines? Dropping the nitty-gritty details and concentrating on implementing algorithms with more ease is what any data scientist would like to get their hands on. Abstraction is a common trait amongst popular machine learning libraries or frameworks like TensorFlow.


AI improves customer experience, call center efficiency

#artificialintelligence

Artificial intelligence serves a number of purposes in contact centers. It can automate routine processes, provide live chat in the form of virtual agents or chatbots to address customer queries, help deliver personalized experiences and provide predictive analytics, among other things. Each of these AI functions helps enhance both the employee and customer experience, and many CX leaders are taking a closer look at how it can help in their companies. The driving force behind this movement is the increase in contact center interaction volume as COVID-19 shows no end in sight, moving customers from physical to virtual buying patterns and requiring help from live customer service agents. CX leaders have reported many changes in their contact centers, including the need for more agents to support customer demand over both the phone and digital channels, and replacing in-person experiences with virtual ones -- driving even more traffic to the contact center.


Learning Set Functions that are Sparse in Non-Orthogonal Fourier Bases

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Many applications of machine learning on discrete domains, such as learning preference functions in recommender systems or auctions, can be reduced to estimating a set function that is sparse in the Fourier domain. In this work, we present a new family of algorithms for learning Fourier-sparse set functions. They require at most $nk - k \log_2 k + k$ queries (set function evaluations), under mild conditions on the Fourier coefficients, where $n$ is the size of the ground set and $k$ the number of non-zero Fourier coefficients. In contrast to other work that focused on the orthogonal Walsh-Hadamard transform, our novel algorithms operate with recently introduced non-orthogonal Fourier transforms that offer different notions of Fourier-sparsity. These naturally arise when modeling, e.g., sets of items forming substitutes and complements. We demonstrate effectiveness on several real-world applications.


How to Convert Speech to Text in Python

#artificialintelligence

Speech Recognition is the ability of a machine or program to identify words and phrases in spoken language and convert them to textual information. You have probably seen it on Sci-fi, and personal assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant, and other virtual assistants that interact with through voice. In order to understand your voice these virtual assistants need to do speech recognition. Speech Recognition is a complex process, so I'm not going to teach you how to train a Machine Learning/Deep Learning Model to do that. Instead, I will instruct you how to do it using google speech recognition API.