Late last month, Snap released Spotlight, a new part of its Snapchat app that, on first swipe, closely resembles TikTok. The update adds a new tab to the app dedicated entirely to short, entertaining vertical videos. It incorporates some of TikTok's signature features, like vertical swipe and the ability to soundtrack your videos with music that's been uploaded to the platform. It's even powered by a mysterious, personalized recommendation algorithm so that, like TikTok, it serves you an endless stream of content without requiring that you follow or add the creators who made it. All of this amounts to a user experience that almost feels like a TikTok feed inside your Snapchat app, but with one noticeable difference: Unlike TikTok's carousel of delights, the content on Spotlight ranges from limp and joyless to cringey and grotesque. The notoriously confusing-to-adults messaging platform once seemed like a plausible rival to Facebook, until Facebook's Instagram ripped it off with Stories, rendering it obsolete for many millennials like myself.

Even the most advanced Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have no real understanding of what they are really doing. The first autonomous cars had fatal accidents when their human drivers were not paying attention as they were programmed to deal with only a set of cars with pre-determined speeds and could not cope up with the complexity of continuous interactions with human drivers they faced (and if they had tested in India, they would have gone crazy with the vehicles coming headlong, or even on the wrong side of the road!). Similarly, a facial recognition system for identifying criminals failed because the input dataset was skewed by police mug-shots in which no-one was smiling. Over the years, AI has become so ubiquitous that we do not even think we are using it. Web Searches, Google Translate, Voice Assistants like Alexa and Siri, fraud alerts from credit-card companies, Amazon recommendations, Spotify playlists, traffic directions, weather forecasts are all taken for granted.

Amazon's fourth-generation Echo Alexa smart speaker is a complete redesign in form and audio, with the popular device transformed into a ball of sound. The Echo costs £89.99 and is Amazon's mid-range speaker, sitting above the £49.99 Echo Dot and below the £189.99 The first smart speaker on the market, the original Echo set the standard in 2014 with a tall cylinder shape and 360-degree audio – resembling a Pringles can with a speaker in it. Six years later and on its fourth generation, Amazon has now broken the mould with a new spherical shape and directional audio. The plastic and mesh fabric ball has one woofer and two tweeter speakers producing directional, stereo sound – and is designed to sit in the corner of a room rather than the centre of it.

With the recent explosion in popularity of voice assistant devices, there is a growing interest in making them available to user populations in additional countries and languages. However, to provide the highest accuracy and best performance for specific user populations, most existing voice assistant models are developed individually for each region or language, which requires linear investment of effort. In this paper, we propose a general multilingual model framework for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models, which can help bootstrap new language models faster and reduce the amount of effort required to develop each language separately. We explore how different deep learning architectures affect multilingual NLU model performance. Our experimental results show that these multilingual models can reach same or better performance compared to monolingual models across language-specific test data while require less effort in creating features and model maintenance.

In this paper we explore the opportunities brought by cognitive augmentation to provide a more natural and accessible web browsing experience. We explore these opportunities through \textit{conversational web browsing}, an emerging interaction paradigm for the Web that enables blind and visually impaired users (BVIP), as well as regular users, to access the contents and features of websites through conversational agents. Informed by the literature, our previous work and prototyping exercises, we derive a conceptual framework for supporting BVIP conversational web browsing needs, to then focus on the challenges of automatically providing this support, describing our early work and prototype that leverage heuristics that consider structural and content features only.

Smart devices, once relegated to science fiction and our imaginations, are now ubiquitous. Today, there's a market for everything from a Wi-Fi connected refrigerator to a voice-operated speaker that doubles as a personal assistant. The internet of things (IoT) -- the software-operated network of physical devices, appliances, vehicles -- grows day by day as these devices become part of our daily lives. A March 2018 survey found that 22% of Americans used IoT appliances in their homes, and this trend is widespread across the globe. Amazon recently announced a plan to expand Amazon Echo services to Italy and Spain.

Although there are many good reasons to remember year 2020, but we have to accept the sad reality i.e. COVID-19 as well which is the major downside of same year. The best parts are the automation and the enhancement of customer experience through ML and AI. Another learning which came out very strongly is "Work From Home", it has taught us that we all can do a lot more from home what we used to think. In current times businesses are more focused on AI & ML and investing massive capital for the same.

Since their inception, search engines have gone from being basic search agents to sophisticated algorithms based on the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). These innovative technologies affect the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) space from two completely opposite perspectives. On the one hand, it has become much more challenging to promote websites and push them to the top of SERP due to new AI-based ranking algorithms able to perform a very in-depth scan beyond meta. On the other hand, as the overall quality of search results has improved significantly, it is more difficult now to manipulate them using different kludges and black hat practices (albeit still possible which I'll show you below) . All in all, artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the approach to SEO.

US tech giants Amazon and Apple have announced new accessibility features for their technology aimed to help people with impaired vision. Amazon's new feature, called Show and Tell, helps blind and partially sighted people identify common household grocery items. The feature, which launches in the UK today, works with Amazon's Echo Show range – devices that combine a camera and a screen with a smart speaker that's powered by its digital assistant Alexa. Apple, meanwhile, has redesigned its dedicated accessibility site to make it easier for iPhone and iPad owners to find vision, hearing and mobility tools for everyday life. These include People Detection, which uses the iPhone's built-in LiDAR scanner to prevent blind users colliding with other people or objects.

Amazon Sidewalk was announced in 2019, but chances are you may just now be hearing a lot of chatter about the new shared neighborhood WiFi network. That's because the service, though not live yet, has been automatically enabled for many users with newer Amazon Echo speakers and Ring cameras--and it's raising some privacy concerns. Here's what you need to know about Amazon Sidewalk and how to turn it off. Amazon Sidewalk is a neighborhood WiFi-sharing feature that helps your Echo speakers and Ring cameras stay connected when they're out of range or the internet is down. Amazon Sidewalk is a network created by pooling nearby Amazon devices that can help your Amazon devices stay connected when they're just out of range or when your WiFi goes out.