This week, anyone looking for a deal on an Apple laptop or Amazon's Echo devices should check this roundup out. Both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air are on sale -- not quite as cheap as they were earlier in the week, but still two good deals. On Amazon's side, the Echo Show remains available for $80 (its lowest price ever) and both models of the Echo Show can be had at significant discounts, as well. A number of Fitbit devices are on sale as part of a summer promotion. One of the best deals is the Fitbit Inspire HR for $70, or $30 off its normal price.

Welsh and Scouse are the British accents that Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant struggle to understand the most, a study has found. In contrast, smart speaker users from London and Lincoln rarely have any problems controlling the devices, a study by UK price comparison site Uswitch found. Artificial Intelligence-powered speakers are estimated to now be in over 5.8 million homes across the United Kingdom. However, researchers have warned that the smart devices are left flummoxed by more than 23 per cent of regional dialects. 'Smart speakers are becoming an integral part of many modern-day homes.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A former personal assistant to tech CEO Fahim Saleh, who was found beheaded and dismembered earlier this week in his New York City apartment, has been taken into police custody in connection with the murder. Police have taken Tyrese Devon Haspel, 21, into custody for the death of the 33-year-old executive, Fox News has confirmed. The person in custody had worked as Saleh's personal assistant, the officials told The Associated Press.

Businesses and developers making conversational AI experiences should start with the understanding that you're going to have to use unsupervised learning to scale, said Prem Natarajan, Amazon head of product and VP of Alexa AI and NLP. He spoke with Barak Turovsky, Google AI director of product for the NLU team, at VentureBeat's Transform 2020 AI conference today as part of a conversation about future trends for AI assistants. Natarajan called unsupervised learning for language models an important trend for AI assistants and an essential part of creating conversational AI that works for everyone. "Don't wait for the unsupervised learning realization to come to you yet again. Start from the understanding that you're going to have to use unsupervised learning at some level of scale," he said.

The personal assistant of tech entrepreneur and CEO Fahim Saleh was arrested in New York Friday in the latter's killing and dismemberment in Saleh's luxury apartment. Tyrese Devon Haspil, 21, is expected to be charged with second-degree murder. The New York Times reported Haspil's motive was the alleged theft of tens of thousands of dollars from Saleh, 33. A source told the Times Saleh had learned of the theft, but didn't report it, instead setting up a "repayment plan" for Haspil. Building security cameras showed Saleh and another man entering the former's Manhattan apartment.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are two technologies that have witnessed a massive growth trend over the years. In a quest to look for a quick, cost-efficient and innovative way to gain advantages from data science, enterprises are relying more on the use of rapidly growing big data available at their disposal. Data and analytics combined with artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will be paramount to predict, prepare and respond in a proactive and accelerated manner to ensure business continuity during this global crisis and after-forward. In 10 Enterprise Analytics Trends to Watch in 2020, Frank Bernhard, author of SHAPE – Digital Strategy by Data & Analytics, notes that in 2020, deep learning should no longer be considered a buzzword, but a "tempest disruptor in how companies will perform with intelligence against their competitors." To enable largely unsupervised learning against unstructured data in a bid to return hidden signals, deep learning will free up the time of in-demand data scientists to connect insights to action.

Many social services including online dating, social media, recruitment and online learning, largely rely on \matching people with the right people". The success of these services and the user experience with them often depends on their ability to match users. Reciprocal Recommender Systems (RRS) arose to facilitate this process by identifying users who are a potential match for each other, based on information provided by them. These systems are inherently more complex than user-item recommendation approaches and unidirectional user recommendation services, since they need to take into account both users' preferences towards each other in the recommendation process. This entails not only predicting accurate preference estimates as classical recommenders do, but also defining adequate fusion processes for aggregating user-to-user preferential information. The latter is a crucial and distinctive, yet barely investigated aspect in RRS research. This paper presents a snapshot analysis of the extant literature to summarize the state-of-the-art RRS research to date, focusing on the fundamental features that differentiate RRSs from other classes of recommender systems. Following this, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for future research on RRSs, with special focus on (i) fusion strategies to account for reciprocity and (ii) emerging application domains related to social recommendation.

They let you watch videos or news clips, walk step by step through recipes, display photos, play music, or ask it questions with different sized screens to meet your needs. Lenovo's Smart Clock (which we rated a 7/10) is our favorite for the bedroom. The Smart Clock typically sells for $80, which is already on the lower end of the price point for smart displays, and right now it's on sale for $50 at Best Buy and Walmart. If you've been considering it, it's a good time to buy. It's a good first smart display, too, if you aren't sure how many screens you want to add to your life.

Are voice assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google Assistant stifling competition when they only let you stream music from a single service, or when then send you to a specific shopping site by default? It's a fair question, and one that European Union regulators are looking to answer as part of a "sweeping" antitrust probe, Bloomberg reports. The European Commission announced the massive probe on Thursday, with EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager warning of a "serious risk" that Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and similar voice assistants could be helping "big companies" such as Amazon, Apple, and Google "push markets beyond the tipping point where competition turns into monopoly." EU regulators, who are slated to survey more than 400 firms as part of the probe, will be focussing on how users of Alexa, Google Assistant, and other voice assistants may often "be presented with an option" rather than a full slate of competitive choices, according to Bloomberg. If a particular voice assistant tends to favor its own products and services over those of a competitor, that "might lead to the fast emergence of dominant digital ecosystems and gatekeepers and might present tipping risks," Bloomberg continues.

It's hard to think of a world without smart home assistant devices such as Amazon's Alexa, ridesharing apps like Uber, fitness trackers, personalized music playlists or even mobile banking. While some of these innovations have only been with us for less than a decade, they're now thoroughly woven into the fabric of modern society. None of them would have been possible without advances in artificial intelligence and data science. Even sustainable fashion and medical research are using these technology tools to their advantage nowadays. What are the risks involved?