Amazon launched Echo Auto in the US back in 2018, designed to bring Alexa voice commands to vehicles where they wouldn't normally be an option. Now, finally, it's arrived in the UK and Canada, as well as Germany, Italy and Spain (it was previously also available in Australia and India). The device uses your phone's cellular connection via a Bluetooth link, letting you talk to Alexa in the usual way -- asking about the weather or to play audiobooks, for example -- as well as carrying out journey-orientated tasks, such as turning on your houselights as you pull into your driveway. Many newer cars already include some kind of voice assistant as standard -- drivers of vehicles without have also had other Alexa-based options to choose from, such as Garmin's Speak series and Anker's Roav Viva. However, a more'official' Amazon Alexa device could be the thing to convince those that haven't yet adopted the technology, even if it's a couple of years in the making.

The first Amazon Echo device designed for use in a car has finally been launched in the UK and Ireland, after being first revealed by the tech giant back in 2018. Amazon Echo Auto allows drivers to play music, check the news, make calls and check their schedule without taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road. The £49.99 device, which clips to car air vent mounts, is powered by Alexa, the company's digital assistant, just like the rest of the Echo smart speaker range. Drivers can use Alexa voice commands such as'Alexa, start my road trip playlist' to enjoy their journey safely without being distracted by their phone. The three-inch-long black box gets internet connectivity by connecting to a user's smartphone and the Alexa app, and using its existing data plan.

Amazon, which is currently being sued for allegedly failing to protect workers from COVID-19, has unveiled a new AI tool it says will help employees follow social distancing rules. The company's "Distance Assistant" combines a TV screen, depth sensors, and AI-enabled camera to track employees' movements and give them feedback in real time. When workers come closer than six feet to one another, circles around their feet flash red on the TV, indicating to employees that they should move to a safe distance apart. The devices are self-contained, meaning they can be deployed quickly where needed and moved about. Amazon compares the system to radar speed checks which give drivers instant feedback on their driving.

After a four-year run, the original Google Home has finally shuffled out of Google's smart speaker lineup, and now comes word that a successor is likely on the way. What are we likely to see in a revamped Google Home, or whatever Google ends up calling it? We already have some ideas. The Google Home smart speaker, which made its debut back in 2016, has been listed as "not available" on the Google store for weeks, and a Google rep recently confirmed to TechHive that the original Google smart speaker has indeed been discontinued. If you still want to snag a Google Home, you can grab one on Best Buy for $30Remove non-product link, a steep discount considering its original $129 price tag.

Computers have been used to analyze and create music since they were first introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. Beginning in the late 1990s, the rise of the Internet and large scale platforms for music recommendation and retrieval have made music an increasingly prevalent domain of machine learning and artificial intelligence research. While still nascent, several different approaches have been employed to tackle what may broadly be referred to as "musical intelligence." This article provides a definition of musical intelligence, introduces a taxonomy of its constituent components, and surveys the wide range of AI methods that can be, and have been, brought to bear in its pursuit, with a particular emphasis on machine learning methods.

Extracting demographic features from hidden factors is an innovative concept that provides multiple and relevant applications. The matrix factorization model generates factors which do not incorporate semantic knowledge. This paper provides a deep learningbased method: DeepUnHide, able to extract demographic information from the users and items factors in collaborative filtering recommender systems. The core of the proposed method is the gradient-based localization used in the image processing literature to highlight the representative areas of each classification class. Validation experiments make use of two public datasets and current baselines. Results show the superiority of DeepUnHide to make feature selection and demographic classification, compared to the state of art of feature selection methods. Relevant and direct applications include recommendations explanation, fairness in collaborative filtering and recommendation to groups of users. Keywords: Feature selection, collaborative filtering, demographic information, matrix factorization, gradient based localization, deep learning.

Artificial Intelligence has been a hot buzz word for the past few years now. From Netflix recommendations to our favorite assistants such as Siri or Cortana, artificial intelligence (AI for short) has found it way everywhere in our life. Many people think they know artificial intelligence when really they have some weird dystopian understanding of it. In reality, artificial intelligence is a broad umbrella term for many other thing. Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Home, and any other voice activated device uses AI.

They met for a few drinks at a bar before going to his apartment in Layton, authorities have said. He called 911 to report the slaying early Sunday morning and told police to shoot him, according to court documents. Hunsaker told police he choked and then stabbed her unprovoked as they cuddled, according to the document.

Services such as Amazon's Alexa could be regulated to allow rival digital assistants to operate on smart speakers and stop the tech giants building a monopoly "in people's kitchens and living rooms", the head of the BBC's radio operation has said. James Purnell, the director of radio and education at the BBC, made the comments weeks after the BBC launched its own voice-activated digital assistant, named Beeb, which offers information such as news, weather and programmes. The BBC is already struggling to keep youth audiences tuning into its TV programming in the Netflix era, and Purnell raised the spectre of the Silicon Valley giants extending that to control of audio access as smart speakers become commonplace. "We now have smart speakers in so many homes, and they are going to be in far more homes," he said, speaking to MPs on the digital, media, culture and sport select committee. "There is a question about whether we are happy about the biggest organisations in the world, big tech companies with their executives essentially [based] in the [United] States, combining a monopoly in people's kitchens and in living rooms. "I do think it is worth thinking about whether there should be some regulation of those smart speakers so there is a choice of assistance for people.

Several WIRED staffers own and love these plugs, including senior associate editor Julian Chokkattu, who recommends them in our Best Smart Bulbs guide. He already owns fancy (and not smart) bulbs, but still wanted the ease of controlling them with his voice via Google Assistant. He connected several lamps to TP-Link's HS105 plugs and has run into little to no issues after using them for more than a year. With the TP-Link Kasa app, you can group plugs together to turn on several items at once, see runtime, set routines, timers, and schedules. It's a little pricier than the Wyze, but you can get the Kasa HS103 model for far less.