Apple gave its TV 4K set-top box some love this year by upgrading the internals and revamping its accompanying Siri remote. But it didn't change the price, which means you'll still pay at least $179 for it. However, Amazon has a new deal that knocks nearly $20 off the 64GB Apple TV 4K, bringing it down to $180. The base, 32GB model has been on sale for $169 for a few weeks at this point, but this new deal essentially lets you get the extra-storage model at the base's original price. We consider the 2021 Apple TV 4K to be the best high-end streaming box you can get, and it's even more attractive if you live in the Apple ecosystem.

Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence are the buzz words in the tech industry. Voice command-based personal home assistants such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, Google, Microsoft's Cortana and even Samsung's Bixby are the trailblazers in the space. But you will be surprised how these technologies are seeping into home products and gadgets you use daily--many of these are synced through the above-mentioned assistants to increase a device's efficacy and we're not talking just smartphones. If you're a tech-savvy Indian who wants to stay on top of the game when it comes to smart devices for the home. Chinese smartphone brand, Xiaomi, has made an entry in the white goods space in India and one of their best-selling products is the Mi Smart Water Purifier.

Amazon has quietly added a masculine-sounding voice to Alexa. The voice assistant's feminine speech is in contrast to competitors from both Google and Apple, which each offer the option to choose different voices. It has led to concern over the gendered implications for offering the voice assistant with only a feminine-sounding voice. Now the company has finally added a masculine-sounding voice, which appears to be called "Ziggy". The change came amid a more loudly announced change that added voices such as Shaquille O'Neal, and was first spotted by The Ambient.

For years, businesses have sought to provide customers with more self-service options and increase automation rates in their contact centers using speech-enabled interactive voice response systems (IVRs). They have also invested heavily in developing web chatbots. However, these systems were complicated to develop and required organizations to purchase, host, and manage a vast array of software, hardware, and equipment. Applications were also created in silos, requiring multiple development projects while making it difficult for applications to share data and context. A number of disruptive innovations have made it easier and more affordable to deploy AI-and-speech-enabled self-service.

Reducing the shortage of organ donations to meet the demands of patients on the waiting list has being a major challenge in organ transplantation. Because of the shortage, organ matching decision is the most critical decision to assign the limited viable organs to the most suitable patients. Currently, organ matching decisions were only made by matching scores calculated via scoring models, which are built by the first principles. However, these models may disagree with the actual post-transplantation matching performance (e.g., patient's post-transplant quality of life (QoL) or graft failure measurements). In this paper, we formulate the organ matching decision-making as a top-N recommendation problem and propose an Adaptively Weighted Top-N Recommendation (AWTR) method. AWTR improves performance of the current scoring models by using limited actual matching performance in historical data set as well as the collected covariates from organ donors and patients. AWTR sacrifices the overall recommendation accuracy by emphasizing the recommendation and ranking accuracy for top-N matched patients. The proposed method is validated in a simulation study, where KAS [60] is used to simulate the organ-patient recommendation response. The results show that our proposed method outperforms seven state-of-the-art top-N recommendation benchmark methods.

AI for supporting designers needs to be rethought. It should aim to cooperate, not automate, by supporting and leveraging the creativity and problem-solving of designers. The challenge for such AI is how to infer designers' goals and then help them without being needlessly disruptive. We present AI-assisted design: a framework for creating such AI, built around generative user models which enable reasoning about designers' goals, reasoning, and capabilities.

Single Australians looking for sex or love will soon stand out from the competition if they've been vaccinated against Covid-19. Dating app Bumble announced it will roll out a new feature this week enabling users in Australia and New Zealand to add a "vaccination badge" to their profile if they've received a Covid-19 jab. Competitor Tinder says it looks forward to "making [vaccine] badges available soon" in Australia too. A Bumble representative says it will not independently verify the vaccination status of those who claim the badge, meaning the system will rely on user honesty. The dating app says it decided to launch the feature after a recent survey revealed a "45% increase in users asking potential dates if they had the vaccine or have Covid symptoms". It's not just in Australia that dating apps are encouraging users to boast about their vaccination status.

Matter, the open-source smart home standard that promises to unite Amazon's, Apple's, and Google's smart home platforms, is one of the most exciting developments that we're tracking in the smart home space. Now comes word that most Amazon Echo speakers will receive firmware updates enabling them to support Matter. The announcement, made during Amazon's Alexa Live developer conference today, means that almost all Alexa-powered Echo devices will be able to control Matter-enabled smart products, a development that will give the upcoming standard a major boost. All current and many legacy Echo speakers will get the Matter update, Amazon says. Indeed, only three older Echo speakers won't work with Matter: the first-generation Echo and Echo Dot speakers, as well as the Amazon Tap, a long-discontinued portable Bluetooth speaker with Alexa on board.

Amazon's support for the Matter smart home platform is coming into focus. Previously known as Project Chip (Connected Home over IP), Matter comes from the Connectivity Standards Alliance, a group made up of device manufacturers like Amazon, Google, Apple and Samsung. It's meant to standardize voice assistant support across multiple devices, as well as to make it easier to connect smart home gadgets to your home network. During its Alexa Live developer presentation, Amazon said that practically every plug-in Echo speaker will support Matter, save for the first-generation Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Tap, The Verge reports. It's unclear when the Echo support will actually arrive, but at this point we're expecting Matter devices to launch later this year. Google has already declared strong commitment for the platform -- so much so that we've speculated it could help unite the fragmented smart home ecosystem.

The final push for the hat trick came down to the wire. Five minutes before the deadline, the team submitted work in its third and hardest data science competition of the year in recommendation systems. Called RecSys, it's a relatively new branch of computer science that's spawned one of the most widely used applications in machine learning, one that helps millions find what they want to watch, buy and play. The team's combination of six AI models packed into the contest's limit of 20 gigabytes all of the smarts it culled from studying 750 million data points. An unusual rule in the competition said the models had to run in less than 24 hours on a single core in a cloud CPU.