Voice control, using either Alexa or Google Assistant, is the U by Moen smart faucet's star attraction, but after testing this kitchen tool for several months, I've concluded that its gesture control feature is far more useful. Voice control is no gimmick, as you'll see when I dig all the things you can do with voice commands. But the tasks for which I use a faucet most often--washing my hands, rinsing dishes, filling a watering can for my houseplants, and the like--waving my hand over the faucet to start the flow of water, and again to stop it is all the technology I need. I love my handmade farmhouse sink, but it seriously complicates changing out the faucet. But that could be because I live in a rural area and draw my water from a well.

If you have ever used Google Maps on your phone without fiddling with the location settings, it goes without saying that the tech giant knows everywhere you've been. The really bad news is that even if you have previously tried to stop Google tracking your every movement, the company may have done so anyway. On Friday the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) won a legal action in the federal court, which ruled that, thanks to a peculiar set-up that required a user to check "No" or "Do Not Collect" to both "Location History" and "Web & App Activity" on some Android and Pixel phones, someone who ticked "No" to just one would still end up being tracked. We asked Dr Katharine Kemp, a legal academic from the University of New South Wales whose focus is consumer law, and the Australian cryptographer Vanessa Teague for their thoughts on the significance of the decision and how a person might go about securing their devices. Kemp, an Apple user herself, says that for many consumers, today's decision may not actually mean much, as the decision only related to Android users and Google has since updated the settings that formed the basis of the ACCC's complaint.

With the proliferation of female robots such as Sophia and the popularity of female virtual assistants such as Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), and Cortana (Microsoft), artificial intelligence seems to have a gender issue. This gender imbalance in AI is a pervasive trend that has drawn sharp criticism in the media (even Unesco warned against the dangers of this practice) because it could reinforce stereotypes about women being objects. But why is femininity injected in artificial intelligent objects? If we want to curb the massive use of female gendering in AI, we need to better understand the deep roots of this phenomenon. In an article published in the journal Psychology & Marketing, we argue that research on what makes people human can provide a new perspective into why feminization is systematically used in AI.

It is important for sociable recommendation dialog systems to perform as both on-task content and social content to engage users and gain their favor. In addition to understand the user preferences and provide a satisfying recommendation, such systems must be able to generate coherent and natural social conversations to the user. Traditional dialog state tracking cannot be applied to such systems because it does not track the attributes in the social content. To address this challenge, we propose DEUX, a novel attribute-guided framework to create better user experiences while accomplishing a movie recommendation task. DEUX has a module that keeps track of the movie attributes (e.g., favorite genres, actors,etc.) in both user utterances and system responses. This allows the system to introduce new movie attributes in its social content. Then, DEUX has multiple values for the same attribute type which suits the recommendation task since a user may like multiple genres, for instance. Experiments suggest that DEUX outperforms all the baselines on being more consistent, fitting the user preferences better, and providing a more engaging chat experience. Our approach can be used for any similar problems of sociable task-oriented dialog system.

Artificial Intelligence shapes a lot of things we do in our day-to-day lives. The Netflix show you're binge-watching while on quarantine, the compulsive purchases you make on Amazon, and even the things you search on the internet come to us courtesy of AI. Investments in AI and its key subset – machine learning, are increasing more than ever. The total global investments by private businesses on AI accumulated to a total of $70 Billion in 2020. A survey by McKinsey reported that 82% of enterprises using AI and machine learning across their organizational activities have received a significant return on investment.

Facebook is testing a new video speed dating app called Sparked which emphasises'kindness' and a'positive dating experience' between users. Developed by the social media giant's New Product Experimentation (NPE) team, the app requires users to have a Facebook profile, The Verge reported. The app requires users to type out what makes them a kind dater when signing up, and these responses will reportedly be "reviewed by a human at Sparked" before people can go on the video dates. The social media giant noted that Sparked would not contain any public profiles, or swiping, or DMs, and is likely to be free to use. Users also have to choose whether they want to date men, women, or nonbinary people, according to The Verge which reportedly accessed the app's website.

Using machine learning in mobile apps offers a way to provide distinctive features, simpler operations, and an enhanced user experience. The impact of machine learning in everyday human lives is hard to ignore. Today, we have intelligent mechanisms all around us. From voice assistants that help you navigate a route to high-tech coffee pots, you are practically dealing with miniature robots everywhere! Increasingly, mobile apps are making use of machine learning to provide additional benefits and services to their users.

Google is continuing to roll out new features for Assistant whenever a set of them becomes ready and today it's announcing a bunch of updates for Spring 2021. Given how much more we're ordering takeout and staying home, these revolve around simplifying the restaurant checkout process and making it easier to automate your smart home. Google's been using its Duplex AI technology to help it update restaurant business information in Maps, and back when we went out more, it also helped users make reservations over the phone. This week, Duplex will help you complete your payments when you're ordering via a restaurant's website. You'll need to first search for the eatery on the Google App on Android, tap "Order Online" and select your items.

The idea of speaking to an intelligent agent and having a human-like conversation has intrigued and captivated the imagination for decades. In recent years, Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa have started to fulfill some of the promise of having a virtual assistant attend to basic tasks and simple information retrieval. However, when it comes to business applications the results have been less impressive. Text-based chatbots emerged with a limited range of success and true voice-based agents didn't fare much better than the old-style IVR phone-trees. What used to be "press 1 for yes", became "say'yes' for "yes".

Amazon's Echo Buds were successful in offering an AirPods alternative to people who prefer Alexa to Siri. Hands-free access to the assistant worked well, the earbuds were affordable at $130 and the company offered a decent amount of customization. However, the first-gen model didn't sound great, battery life was short and Bose-powered Active Noise Reduction (ANR) wasn't as powerful as true active noise cancellation (ANC). Today, Amazon is introducing a redesigned second-gen version of the Echo Buds that are cheaper, smaller and address all the key flaws from the initial release. The main feature of the all-new Echo Buds is still hands-free access to Alexa.