Amazon is opening up its AI tech to automakers and other third-companies with a new product called Alexa Custom Assistant. It will allow brands to build their own custom intelligent assistants that "co-exist" with Alexa, according to Amazon. That will allow them to create unique wake words, voices and capabilities "to each company's unique personality and customer needs," the company wrote in a press release. Alexa Custom Assistant will let customers use both Alexa and their own branded assistant to do something called "simultaneous multi-assistant cooperation. "This allows the brand's assistant to act as the product specialist, while Alexa is still available to help with everyday needs," Amazon wrote.

Personalized gamification explores knowledge about the users to tailor gamification designs to improve one-size-fits-all gamification. The tailoring process should simultaneously consider user and contextual characteristics (e.g., activity to be done and geographic location), which leads to several occasions to tailor. Consequently, tools for automating gamification personalization are needed. The problems that emerge are that which of those characteristics are relevant and how to do such tailoring are open questions, and that the required automating tools are lacking. We tackled these problems in two steps. First, we conducted an exploratory study, collecting participants' opinions on the game elements they consider the most useful for different learning activity types (LAT) via survey. Then, we modeled opinions through conditional decision trees to address the aforementioned tailoring process. Second, as a product from the first step, we implemented a recommender system that suggests personalized gamification designs (which game elements to use), addressing the problem of automating gamification personalization. Our findings i) present empirical evidence that LAT, geographic locations, and other user characteristics affect users' preferences, ii) enable defining gamification designs tailored to user and contextual features simultaneously, and iii) provide technological aid for those interested in designing personalized gamification. The main implications are that demographics, game-related characteristics, geographic location, and LAT to be done, as well as the interaction between different kinds of information (user and contextual characteristics), should be considered in defining gamification designs and that personalizing gamification designs can be improved with aid from our recommender system.

New York – There is no question that we are all more dependent on technology than ever. So what happens when that tech does not work? In the past, Emily Dreyfuss used an old-school strategy: She yelled. When Amazon's Alexa spat out wrong answers or misunderstood questions, Dreyfuss let the virtual assistant have it. "I used her as a scapegoat for my feelings," said Dreyfuss, a writer and editor for Harvard's Shorenstein Center.

Voice-driven services (VDS) are being used in a variety of applications ranging from smart home control to payments using digital assistants. The input to such services is often captured via an open voice channel, e.g., using a microphone, in an unsupervised setting. One of the key operational security requirements in such setting is the freshness of the input speech. We present AEOLUS, a security overlay that proactively embeds a dynamic acoustic nonce at the time of user interaction, and detects the presence of the embedded nonce in the recorded speech to ensure freshness. We demonstrate that acoustic nonce can (i) be reliably embedded and retrieved, and (ii) be non-disruptive (and even imperceptible) to a VDS user. Optimal parameters (acoustic nonce's operating frequency, amplitude, and bitrate) are determined for (i) and (ii) from a practical perspective. Experimental results show that AEOLUS yields 0.5% FRR at 0% FAR for speech re-use prevention upto a distance of 4 meters in three real-world environments with different background noise levels. We also conduct a user study with 120 participants, which shows that the acoustic nonce does not degrade overall user experience for 94.16% of speech samples, on average, in these environments. AEOLUS can therefore be used in practice to prevent speech re-use and ensure the freshness of speech input.

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The Google Home Mini, like the Amazon Echo Dot, really started the smart speaker revolution -- and while the Google Home Mini launched in 2016, it's still humming along with more smarts than ever before. Right now at StackSocial the Google Home Mini is just $19.99 -- nearly 60% off its original $49.95 price tag. The big appeal of the Home Mini is adding the Google Assistant to your room. You can ask for your favorite music, a trivia game show to entertain the children and even questions. The assistant knows how far Earth is from the sun and the weather in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, alike.

TP-Link has today announced an updated version of its Deco mesh networking gear that now has voice control, through Amazon Alexa. The Deco Voice X20 packs in a smart speaker in every satellite point that enables users to control the smart parts of their home without buying more Echo Dots. The two pack you can buy at retail is said to cover 4,000 square feet in WiFi 6, with truly "seamless roaming." The hardware is pretty interesting to look at, too, with a white cylinder floating on a hot-rod red base. Mesh networks rely upon gadgets being strewn around your home in prominent places, not hidden behind cupboards. In order to encourage this, device makers have both made their gear look better, but also do more to ensure that they find a place in your heart.

In this work we present an explainable system for emotion attribution and recommendation (called DEGARI) relying on a recently introduced commonsense reasoning framework (the TCL logic) which is based on a human-like procedure for the automatic generation of novel concepts in a Description Logics knowledge base. Starting from an ontological formalization of emotions (known as ArsEmotica), the system exploits the logic TCL to automatically generate novel commonsense semantic representations of compound emotions (e.g. Love as derived from the combination of Joy and Trust according to the ArsEmotica model). The generated emotions correspond to prototypes, i.e. commonsense representations of given concepts, and have been used to reclassify emotion-related contents in a variety of artistic domains, ranging from art datasets to the editorial content available in RaiPlay, the online multimedia platform of RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana (the Italian public broadcasting company). We have tested our system (1) by reclassifying the available contents in the tested dataset with respect to the new generated compound emotions (2) with an evaluation, in the form of a controlled user study experiment, of the feasibility of using the obtained reclassifications as recommended emotional content. The obtained results are encouraging and pave the way to many possible further improvements and research directions.

Amazon is making it easier to remember an event you don't want to miss. The Verge reports that Amazon has quietly introduced a hinted-at "tell me when" Alexa command that not only answers your question about an event, but sets a reminder when that event happens. If you ask Alexa to "tell me when the Super Bowl is," your Echo or a similar device will both answer the question (February 7th, 2021, for the record) and alert you that day. You can also use "tell me when" for things like TV show air dates, holidays, or emails from contacts. The feature is only available for Alexa users in the US at present.

It's been a busy few weeks here at Engadget. In addition to celebrating the holidays, ringing in the New Year and prepping for next week's virtual CES, we've kept reviewing all the new gadgets and components that we can get our hands on. We start off with the long-awaited Apple AirPods Max headphones and, more recently, the Amazon Echo Frames which are now finally available. We also checked out Sony's portable A7C camera, HP's Reverb G2 mixed reality headset, NVIDIA's RTX 3060 Ti and the flexible Hologram Electronics Microcosm effects pedal. Long-rumored and quietly revealed last month, the AirPods Max are high-end, over-ear headphones constructed from aluminum and metal and available in five colors.