Amazon just gave Alexa a mind of its own by enabling it to ask humans questions. The tech giant is set to add'teachable' artificial intelligence to the virtual assistant, allowing it to ask questions in order to understand the contextual conversation and learn from its owners. During the firm's annual product launch event, Amazon also introduced natural turn taking, which allows users to speak to Alexa with using a wake wording to provide'more natural and expressive' conversations. Rohit Prasad, vice president of Amazon, said: 'You can ask'Alexa, join my conversation,' and Alexa will join in the conversation to help you and friend decide what pizza to order, or get a movie recommendation for a night at home with your family.' Amazon is set to add'teachable' artificial intelligence to the virtual assistant, allowing it to ask questions in order to understand the contextual conversation and learn from its owners Prasad explained that Amazon has been working years to advance Alexa, noting to teach the assistant instantaneously took three to four years to complete.

Amazon just announced its new line of Echo devices, and they are drastically different than the ones we have grown to love. Their form factor is completely new for 2020, and even more exciting is the fact that they are now available for pre-order. Echo devices and their built-in smart assistant, Alexa, have become the most popular names in smart home following their 2014 debut. Every year since, Amazon has launched new smart speakers, displays, earbuds, fashion assistants, and even eyeglasses. Some of it sticks, and some gets phased.

The all new Echo Show 10 might be the biggest news to come out of the firehose of Amazon's Devices & Services event today. The new smart display features a 10-inch touchscreen that rotates around its base so that it's always within your line of sight. Amazon says it's adding Netflix support, too, so you won't miss a second of Stranger Things while you're otherwise busy cooking dinner. To assuage privacy concerns, Amazon says the new smart display triangulates on a human figure, not facial recognition, and that the artificial intelligence processing required to pull off the trick is performed on the device, not in the cloud. You can also turn the feature off with the voice command "Alexa, turn off motion."

At its annual hardware event, Amazon today announced new capabilities for its Alexa personal assistant that will allow it to become more personalized as it can now ask clarifying questions and then use this personalized data to interact with the user later on. In addition, Alexa can now join a conversation, too, starting a mode where you don't have to say'hey Alexa' all the time. With that, multiple users can interact with Alexa and the system will chime in when it's appropriate (or not -- since we haven't tested this yet). As Amazon VP and head scientist Rohit Prasad noted, the system for asking questions and personalizing responses uses a deep learning-based approach that allows Alexa to acquire new concepts and actions based on what it learns from customers. Whatever it learns is personalized and only applies to this individual customer.

For the fourth year running, Amazon has a new smart display. The $250 Echo Show 10 has a rotating base that can turn the screen silently to face you whereever you are in a room. Amazon suggests that could be useful for hands-free video calls as you're moving around. The device will support Zoom calls, Skype and Amazon Chime, while Amazon is adding a group calling feature with up to eight people in a video chat. During video calls, the 13 MP camera can automatically pan and zoom to keep you centered in the frame.

Last year's Echo was a complete home run for Amazon -- it delivered excellent sound quality and responsive microphones for a relatively inexpensive $100. So how can it make the flagship Alexa speaker any better? It's still $100, but now it looks even more like something ripped from a sci-fi film. The flagship Echo is also being joined by a new Echo Dot that also looks like a sphere, and keeps the low $50 price. There's also an Echo Dot with a clock display for $60, which could make a great bedside companion.

Finally, AI is ready for the mainstream. When your enterprise is handling transactions between 25 million sellers and 182 million buyers, supporting 1.5 billion listings, manual decision-making processes just won't cut. Such is the case with eBay, the mega commerce site, that has been employing artificial intelligence for more than a decade. As Forbes contributor Bernard Marr points out, eBay employs AI across a broad range of functions, "in personalization, search, insights, discovery and its recommendation systems along with computer vision, translation, natural language processing and more." As part of a massive operation with so much experience with AI, Mazen Rawashdeh, CTO of eBay, has plenty to say about the current state of enterprise AI.

Search and recommendation systems, such as search engines, recruiting tools, online marketplaces, news, and social media, output ranked lists of content, products, and sometimes, people. Credit ratings, standardized tests, risk assessments output only a score, but are also used implicitly for ranking. Bias in such ranking systems, especially among the top ranks, can worsen social and economic inequalities, polarize opinions, and reinforce stereotypes. On the other hand, a bias correction for minority groups can cause more harm if perceived as favoring group-fair outcomes over meritocracy. In this paper, we study a trade-off between individual fairness and group fairness in ranking. We define individual fairness based on how close the predicted rank of each item is to its true rank, and prove a lower bound on the trade-off achievable for simultaneous individual and group fairness in ranking. We give a fair ranking algorithm that takes any given ranking and outputs another ranking with simultaneous individual and group fairness guarantees comparable to the lower bound we prove. Our algorithm can be used to both pre-process training data as well as post-process the output of existing ranking algorithms. Our experimental results show that our algorithm performs better than the state-of-the-art fair learning to rank and fair post-processing baselines.

A Chatbot is a pure magic. AI-powered virtual assistants are the future of the tech industry that opened the door for all companies to interact with their users. The Chatbot is not a new concept. Although they have been technically using since the 1950s, virtual bots are hottest in the technology and digital marketing world. Many popular brands such as Uber, Pizza Hut implemented them to reach more customers efficiently. As a survey of 2018, 38% of Americans would use Chatbots to interact with a company or brand.

Google has a new Assistant routine that will remind you of the passage of time as you continue to work from home. The workday routine will prompt you to get up and move, go for a walk, grab a glass of water and other normal human being activities at various points throughout the day, just in case, you know, you were beginning to atrophy at your desk while seasons changed outside your window. The new feature rolls out this week and comes pre-configured with suggested actions at specific times, though you can customize these yourself. So instead of (or in addition to) "start preparing dinner" at 5pm, you might set a reminder to "Take a shower, you stink" at 7pm, too. Assistant will serve these reminders through your smart display or speaker, and will also regularly share the time with you throughout the day.