Tinder is set to make online dating amid coronavirus lockdowns more personal. The dating site is adding a video-chatting feature to its popular app by the end of June, allowing those in isolation to virtually meet one-on-one. The feature was announced during the Match Group's, Tinder's parent company, first quarter earnings call and this is the largest addition to the platform since launching in 2012. Along with the video chatting service, Tinder also shared that it has seen a surge in usage during the pandemic - with women users swiping 37 percent more each day than before. Tinder is set to make online dating amid coronavirus lockdowns more personal.

To build Sounding Board, we develop a system architecture that is capable of accommodating dialog strategies that we designed for socialbot conversations. The architecture consists of a multi-dimensional language understanding module for analyzing user utterances, a hierarchical dialog management framework for dialog context tracking and complex dialog control, and a language generation process that realizes the response plan and makes adjustments for speech synthesis. Additionally, we construct a new knowledge base to power the socialbot by collecting social chat content from a variety of sources. An important contribution of the system is the synergy between the knowledge base and the dialog management, i.e., the use of a graph structure to organize the knowledge base that makes dialog control very efficient in bringing related content to the discussion. Using the data collected from Sounding Board during the competition, we carry out in-depth analyses of socialbot conversations and user ratings which provide valuable insights in evaluation methods for socialbots. We additionally investigate a new approach for system evaluation and diagnosis that allows scoring individual dialog segments in the conversation. Finally, observing that socialbots suffer from the issue of shallow conversations about topics associated with unstructured data, we study the problem of enabling extended socialbot conversations grounded on a document. To bring together machine reading and dialog control techniques, a graph-based document representation is proposed, together with methods for automatically constructing the graph. Using the graph-based representation, dialog control can be carried out by retrieving nodes or moving along edges in the graph. To illustrate the usage, a mixed-initiative dialog strategy is designed for socialbot conversations on news articles.

This article is the second in a series of insights for IoT in 2020. As 2019 comes to a close, Aeris is making an assessment of the IoT industry, looking toward the year ahead, and highlighting the innovators in IoT and M2M connectivity. The 2010s have seen rapid advancements in machine learning techniques. Bolstered by the Internet of Things (IoT), connected smart devices are enabling automation and predictions at scales never imagined before. According to a report from Zion Market Research, spending around machine learning is projected to reach $20.83 billion in 2024, at a sharp annual growth rate of 44%.

Artificial intelligence has a bad rap. Facial recognition algorithms -- like those used by law enforcement agencies around the country -- encourage racism. Digital assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, make children ruder. Predictive algorithms, like those employed by Facebook, narrow our perspectives. Meanwhile, language translators, including Google Translate, are said to hinder meaningful emotional connection.

Machine learning algorithms have come a long way since the inception of basic AI such as those in video-games from the 1990's. Over the course of several years, artificial intelligent powered voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have improved significantly, redefining and changing the way we interact with AI from on screen to voice control. It's hard to comprehend just how far we have come in terms of our research and knowledge on artificial intelligence. We're surrounded by artificial intelligence in our day-to-day lives so it comes as no surprise that we don't seem to recognise the many hurdles we have overcome in constructing complex machine learning algorithms in recent years. The image below shows the remarkable advances we have made in the field of machine learning.

Chances are you like technology but sometimes struggle to use it. It's as if you need a degree in computer science just to understand the latest lingo today – gigahertz this, megapixel that, and terabyte this – so wouldn't it be refreshing if there were quick and easy ways to get the most out of your tech? And so, the following are a dozen or so "tech hacks" to consider, which might especially come in handy during these challenging times, as many of these software or hardware tips, tricks and shortcuts might save you money, time and aggravation. If you own an iPhone or iPad, enable a feature called Speak Screen. After you do so – by going to Settings Accessibility Spoken Content Speak Screen – swipe down from top of the screen with two fingers, on any page, and the onscreen text will be read to you. Now your ebooks are audiobooks you can listen to while multitasking, such as running on a treadmill or cleaning the home.

We present ADVISER - an open-source, multi-domain dialog system toolkit that enables the development of multi-modal (incorporating speech, text and vision), socially-engaged (e.g. emotion recognition, engagement level prediction and backchanneling) conversational agents. The final Python-based implementation of our toolkit is flexible, easy to use, and easy to extend not only for technically experienced users, such as machine learning researchers, but also for less technically experienced users, such as linguists or cognitive scientists, thereby providing a flexible platform for collaborative research. Link to open-source code: https://github.com/DigitalPhonetics/adviser

Me: "I love you, Siri." Siri: "You are the wind beneath my wings." Anyone else had that "conversation" with your iPhone? We're amused, and even a little amazed, at how "she" responds to us. We ask Alexa to turn down the lights in the living room.

It's quite common to see deals on smart speakers, but they're not often as tempting as this one. Best Buy is selling the original Google Home for just $30, or less than a third of its official $100 price. That's better than the $50 from not long ago, and puts it at the same price that you'd currently pay for the considerably less capable Nest Mini. You can find the speaker for ever-so-slightly less at the Google Store if you'd rather go direct. The Home's design may seem a bit old compared to newer Google smart speakers, but it's still capable.

Now might be a prime opportunity to shop if you're looking for a connected alarm clock or a video viewer for the kitchen. Amazon is offering substantial discounts on its Echo Show smart displays, with the Echo Show 5 on sale for $50 ($40 off) and the larger Echo Show 8 selling for $80 ($50 off). Those match price drops we saw on Black Friday, and could make them tempting compared to audio-only smart speakers. The Echo Show 5 is clearly meant as a nightstand companion and won't blow you away with its 5-inch screen, but it delivers better sound quality than you'd expect for the size while including helpful alarm clock features like a sunrise alarm and an ambient light sensor. The Echo Show 8 can fill that role, but its 8-inch display makes it the better of the two for following recipes or catching up on your Netflix queue.