Over the past five years the Amazon Echo and Alexa voice service has paved the way for exciting smart home devices. Now we are being introduced the brand's hottest new release: the Echo Flex - a smart speaker that saves on space by conveniently plugging straight into the wall. With a price tag of just £24.99, the Echo Flex is certainly one of the cheapest options to get Amazon's Alexa in more places throughout your home. It is available for pre-order now and due for release tomorrow 14 November 2019. Whether it's in your hallway, kitchen, or attic, this impressive smart speaker will assist you in a multitude of everyday tasks.

Black Friday is nearly upon us - and you'll get even more time to snap up a bargain this year as Amazon is slashing prices a whole week early from November 22. If you can't wait until then, we've rounded up the best discounts on top tech available now, from Amazon Echo Dots and Apple Airpods to TVs, laptops and Roku Streaming Sticks. If you're not an Amazon Prime member yet, sign up for a free 30-day trial to enjoy unlimited one-day delivery on millions of items. With an RRP of £49.99, get £15 off the best-selling Amazon Echo Dot Smart Speaker with Alexa in this great deal which is on now. If you've still not joined the Echo Dot revolution, you can enjoy music and hands-free phone calls through other Echo devices, Skype and the Alexa app.

DPAs (Digital Personal Assistants) are practically running our lives after 29 years since the first virtual assistant was launched even if you think you're not using one. They have integrated into all of the mobile devices and control how we manage our day to day lives without us evening noticing. Amazon launched Alexa in 2014 and more than 100m of its Echo and Dot gadgets are installed in homes around the world today. In just five years, Alexa is topping the DPA market with 8.2 million users around the world and 61.1% of US market shares of smart speakers. Amazon is adding more and more features into Alexa, that is why it's the most intelligent of all assistants in the market. Below we discuss the most important features Alexa provides that make our lives smart and us smarter.

Slowly but surely, artificial intelligence is infiltrating almost every aspect of our lives. It is already busy in the background of many routine tasks, powering virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, recommendations from Amazon and Netflix, and underpinning billions of Google searches each day. But as the technology matures, AI's impact will become more profound, and nowhere is that more apparent than in healthcare. Healthcare's data-heavy nature makes it an ideal candidate for the application of AI across multiple disciplines, from diagnosis and pathology to drug discovery and epidemiology. At the same time, the sensitivity of medical data raises fundamental questions around privacy and security.

We use a novel modification of Multi-Armed Bandits to create a new model for recommendation systems. We model the recommendation system as a bandit seeking to maximize reward by pulling on arms with unknown rewards. The catch however is that this bandit can only access these arms through an unreliable intermediate that has some level of autonomy while choosing its arms. For example, in a streaming website the user has a lot of autonomy while choosing content they want to watch. The streaming sites can use targeted advertising as a means to bias opinions of these users. Here the streaming site is the bandit aiming to maximize reward and the user is the unreliable intermediate. We model the intermediate as accessing states via a Markov chain. The bandit is allowed to perturb this Markov chain. We prove fundamental theorems for this setting after which we show a close-to-optimal Explore-Commit algorithm.

--Contextual bandits have the same exploration-exploitation tradeoff as standard multi-armed bandits. On adding positive externalities that decay with time, this problem becomes much more difficult as wrong decisions at the start are hard to recover from. We explore existing policies in this setting and highlight their biases towards the inherent reward matrix. We propose a rejection based policy that achieves a low regret irrespective of the structure of the reward probability matrix. In the context of restaurant recommendation systems, users can generally be classified into multiple user types with different preferences for different restaurants.

Social activities play an important role in people's daily life since they interact. For recommendations based on social activities, it is vital to have not only the activity information but also individuals' social relations. Thanks to the geo-social networks and widespread use of location-aware mobile devices, massive geo-social data is now readily available for exploitation by the recommendation system. In this paper, a novel group recommendation method, called attentive geo-social group recommendation, is proposed to recommend the target user with both activity locations and a group of users that may join the activities. We present an attention mechanism to model the influence of the target user $u_T$ in candidate user groups that satisfy the social constraints. It helps to retrieve the optimal user group and activity topic candidates, as well as explains the group decision-making process. Once the user group and topics are retrieved, a novel efficient spatial query algorithm SPA-DF is employed to determine the activity location under the constraints of the given user group and activity topic candidates. The proposed method is evaluated in real-world datasets and the experimental results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms baseline methods.

Amazon's Echo has been our long-time favorite in the lineup of Alexa-enabled smart speakers and displays. Since its introduction in 2015, the Echo has stood out in an increasingly congested marketplace for its sound quality, far-field voice technology, and minimal footprint. The new Echo is no exception to that trend with its improved speaker, rounded design, and ever-helpful Alexa. Let's dig a little deeper into what the third-generation Echo is about and whether you should get one. The third-generation Echo can put out decent sound with its 0.8-inch tweeter and 3-inch woofer. While you might find the Echo's entry-level smaller sibling, the Dot, appealing for its lower price point, the Echo is a reasonable place to get started with smart speakers because it manages to produce respectable sound quality for its size and sub-$100 cost.

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." That famous line from Bill Gates certainly applies to the banking industry. While banking may still look much as it does today in the next year or two, the springboards for dramatic change already are in place. Those forces -- operating in tandem with shifting consumer expectations -- will have an unprecedented impact in the decade ahead, accelerating the transformation of the banking landscape. It's not too late for traditional banks and credit unions to thrive in this dynamic environment.

The process of finding love online is becoming more in trend these days. Artificial Intelligence enabled solutions is becoming an integral part of our daily life. This advanced technology has introduced stimulating possibilities from online shopping to taxi booking services. AI is way more ahead in offering more accurate and refined features. Likewise, Artificial intelligence (AI) with time is redefining the future of matchmaking more conveniently.