As voice-based assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant become ubiquitous, users increasingly expect to maintain natural and informative conversations with such systems. However, for an open-domain conversational system to be coherent and engaging, it must be able to maintain the user's interest for extended periods, without sounding boring or annoying. In this paper, we investigate one natural approach to this problem, of modulating response prosody, i.e., changing the pitch and cadence of the response to indicate delight, sadness or other common emotions, as well as using pre-recorded interjections. Intuitively, this approach should improve the naturalness of the conversation, but attempts to quantify the effects of prosodic modulation on user satisfaction and engagement remain challenging. To accomplish this, we report results obtained from a large-scale empirical study that measures the effects of prosodic modulation on user behavior and engagement across multiple conversation domains, both immediately after each turn, and at the overall conversation level. Our results indicate that the prosody modulation significantly increases both immediate and overall user satisfaction. However, since the effects vary across different domains, we verify that prosody modulations do not substitute for coherent, informative content of the responses. Together, our results provide useful tools and insights for improving the naturalness of responses in conversational systems.

Even if your grad has finally made it through college, that doesn't mean they're ready to step out into the real world with no help. They'll not only have to find a job but also might need a little help living on their own, taking on more responsibility and being more of an adult in general. That includes having better security practices, dressing smarter and, if they're lucky enough to find their own apartment, making their new place feel more like home. Here are a few gadgets that could help ease the transition into "adulthood." It's not a terribly sexy subject, but keeping your online data safe should be a priority for everyone, including your new grad.

Amazon Alexa users can now use the "Drop In" feature to talk with all of their Echo devices at once, Amazon announced on its blog. Previously, Drop In messages could only be sent to one other Alexa-enabled device at a time -- a user with an Alexa device in the bedroom could "drop in" on a device in the kitchen and have a two-way conversation. Now, you can use a device to send a message to all Echo devices in the house at once. This could be helpful with asking group questions like, "Does anyone want anything from the grocery store?" according to the Amazon blog. To start a group Drop In conversation, you can ask Alexa to "Drop In everywhere."

SDL (LSE: SDL), the intelligent language and content company, announces it has entered into a technical partnership with DRUID, specialists in conversational AI, to launch multi-lingual virtual assistants for enterprise organizations that enable real-time communication through chatbots. By integrating SDL Machine Translation with DRUID virtual assistants, companies will be able to conduct chatbot conversations in different languages with employees, customers, partners and suppliers. The solution offers a real-time "interpreter mode" function, which can translate conversations along with "live chat" which can translate into multiple languages in real-time. This supports the need for customers to easily translate entire conversations as well as enable scenarios where an agent – human or virtual – needs to communicate across multiple languages simultaneously. Chatbots are commonly configured to undergo complicated question-and-answering activities in different languages, but language-specific customization can be complex, time-consuming and costly.

U.S. national security officials have approved an investor group's purchase of gay-dating app Grindr that is being sold by a Chinese company after the Trump administration raised concerns about the potential theft of Americans' personal data. In investor documents released Friday, China's Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. said that the buyer has secured approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a panel of national security experts who ordered that Beijing Kunlun Tech sell its ownership last year.

You no longer have to live in an Amazon-focused household for Arlo's Video Doorbell to make the most sense. Arlo has introduced Google Assistant support to deliver notifications and send commands. If you're worried about the ruckus outside, you can ask Google to "show me the front door" and get a video feed sent to a smart display like the Nest Hub Max. The Video Doorbell normally sells for $150. That's more than rivals like Ring's new starter doorbell, but it gives you the choice of both Alexa and Google Assistant.

Embedding based models have been the state of the art in collaborative filtering for over a decade. Traditionally, the dot product or higher order equivalents have been used to combine two or more embeddings, e.g., most notably in matrix factorization. In recent years, it was suggested to replace the dot product with a learned similarity e.g. using a multilayer perceptron (MLP). This approach is often referred to as neural collaborative filtering (NCF). In this work, we revisit the experiments of the NCF paper that popularized learned similarities using MLPs. First, we show that with a proper hyperparameter selection, a simple dot product substantially outperforms the proposed learned similarities. Second, while a MLP can in theory approximate any function, we show that it is non-trivial to learn a dot product with an MLP. Finally, we discuss practical issues that arise when applying MLP based similarities and show that MLPs are too costly to use for item recommendation in production environments while dot products allow to apply very efficient retrieval algorithms. We conclude that MLPs should be used with care as embedding combiner and that dot products might be a better default choice.

Apple has acquired machine learning startup Inductiv Inc., in a bid to improve Siri's capabilities, according to Bloomberg. Apple confirmed the deal to Bloomberg with its usual response to inquiries about acquisitions, saying that it "buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The company has not yet responded to Business Insider's request for comment. A few Inductiv Inc. employees recently updated their LinkedIn profiles to indicate that they've begun working at Apple in April or May. Inductiv Inc.'s technology automates the process of correcting flaws in data through the use of artificial intelligence.

The Amazon Echo Look camera is a standalone device that leveraged machine learning and artificial intelligence to give users fashion advice, making it easier to get dressed in the morning. Amazon has announced via an email sent out to owners of the Echo Look that the camera and its app will no longer function after July 24, 2020. The good news is that Amazon is offering a free Echo Show 5 to owners of the defunct device. The free product should go a long way to making Look owners feel better about Amazon killing their product, but not offering refunds. As for how the Echo Show 5 will replace fashion advice provided by the Look, Amazon says that it has been integrating features from the Look into the Amazon Shopping app and other Alexa-enabled devices.

You may even be using one to read this article. Wi-Fi has become essential to our personal and professional lives. The smartphone and the internet we use today wouldn't have been possible without wireless communication technologies such as Wi-Fi. In 1995 if you wanted to "surf" the internet at home, you had to chain yourself to a network cable like it was an extension cord. In 1997, Wi-Fi was invented and released for consumer use.