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 Personal Assistant Systems


Google's Nest Hub could be your next hotel concierge

Engadget

The next time you're wrapping up a trip (whenever that might be amid the COVID-19 pandemic), you might find yourself asking Google Assistant to check you out of a hotel. Google is bringing hands-free hospitality to hotel rooms through its Nest Hub smart displays. Participating hotels will set up a Nest Hub in each room, through which you can ask the front desk for a wake up call or more towels, and learn about pool opening times. They can set up the system to control smart devices in rooms, including blinds, lights and the TV. The Nest Hub can act as a concierge of sorts, as you can ask for recommendations and opening hours for restaurants and stores.


Abstractive Summarization of Spoken and Written Instructions with BERT

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Summarization of speech is a difficult problem due to the spontaneity of the flow, disfluencies, and other issues that are not usually encountered in written texts. Our work presents the first application of the BERTSum model to conversational language. We generate abstractive summaries of narrated instructional videos across a wide variety of topics, from gardening and cooking to software configuration and sports. In order to enrich the vocabulary, we use transfer learning and pretrain the model on a few large cross-domain datasets in both written and spoken English. We also do preprocessing of transcripts to restore sentence segmentation and punctuation in the output of an ASR system. The results are evaluated with ROUGE and Content-F1 scoring for the How2 and WikiHow datasets. We engage human judges to score a set of summaries randomly selected from a dataset curated from HowTo100M and YouTube. Based on blind evaluation, we achieve a level of textual fluency and utility close to that of summaries written by human content creators. The model beats current SOTA when applied to WikiHow articles that vary widely in style and topic, while showing no performance regression on the canonical CNN/DailyMail dataset. Due to the high generalizability of the model across different styles and domains, it has great potential to improve accessibility and discoverability of internet content. We envision this integrated as a feature in intelligent virtual assistants, enabling them to summarize both written and spoken instructional content upon request.


BrandPost: Why Can't Smart Home Device Security be Smarter?

PCWorld

More than 83 million U.S. households have at least one smart device, and most of us have more than one. In fact, in the U.S., on average we have 11 devices connected to our home networks, according to one study. Take a quick tally of your own devices. The list goes on and is only going to grow. The bad news is that it's often difficult to understand how your network router interacts with the various devices in your home.


Council Post: 14 Experts Predict The Most Impactful Tech To Come In The 2020s

#artificialintelligence

The technology field is constantly evolving and growing. Yesterday's tech disrupters have quickly become today's industry standards, just as today's innovations will become commonplace in the future. To stay ahead of the curve, we asked the members of Forbes Technology Council to name the biggest tech disrupter they see impacting business and industry in the 2020s. Here are the 14 technologies they believe consumers and businesses should watch as the decade unfolds and how these disrupters might shape tomorrow's standards. Digital voice assistants are at the beginning of their disruption curve.


Application of Artificial Intelligence in E-Commerce

#artificialintelligence

Ecommerce is in developing trend right now. Your success in online business depends upon the type of marketing strategy you are using. To reach the exact crowd, a business should adopt intelligent digital marketing. You can enhance your business with the aid of artificial intelligence. This brief will discuss the e-commerce factors that can be optimized with artificial intelligence.


PODCAST - Ginmon provides automated and personal online wealth management

#artificialintelligence

We build a platform, that totally automizes the wealth management process. Lars started out as a management consultant inside of Deutsche Bank, in their unit called in-house-consulting, focusing on their retail business. Our clients are wealthy, but not wealthy enough to qualify for traditional wealth management. You can now support us on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u 35246148 if you like what you see and hear consider to support us, so we can keep bringing you great content. There was no one at my company interested in what is today robo advisors, so I started my own and do not regret it until this day. They are wealthy enough to have money to invest, but in Germany, the normal threshold to enter the wealth management services of large banks is 2 million Euros, and they do not qualify yet. Ginmon wants to be the online financial advisor for this clientele. Therefore, they became fully licensed as a wealth manager in 2017, by German financial services oversight body BaFin. They now have an investment volume of more than 100 mn Euros for approx. According to Lars, they have approx.


Towards Comprehensive Recommender Systems: Time-Aware UnifiedcRecommendations Based on Listwise Ranking of Implicit Cross-Network Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The abundance of information in web applications make recommendation essential for users as well as applications. Despite the effectiveness of existing recommender systems, we find two major limitations that reduce their overall performance: (1) inability to provide timely recommendations for both new and existing users by considering the dynamic nature of user preferences, and (2) not fully optimized for the ranking task when using implicit feedback. Therefore, we propose a novel deep learning based unified cross-network solution to mitigate cold-start and data sparsity issues and provide timely recommendations for new and existing users.Furthermore, we consider the ranking problem under implicit feedback as a classification task, and propose a generic personalized listwise optimization criterion for implicit data to effectively rank a list of items. We illustrate our cross-network model using Twitter auxiliary information for recommendations on YouTube target network. Extensive comparisons against multiple time aware and cross-network base-lines show that the proposed solution is superior in terms of accuracy, novelty and diversity. Furthermore, experiments conducted on the popular MovieLens dataset suggest that the proposed listwise ranking method outperforms existing state-of-the-art ranking techniques.


CnGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Cross-network user preference generation for non-overlapped users

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A major drawback of cross-network recommender solutions is that they can only be applied to users that are overlapped across networks. Thus, the non-overlapped users, which form the majority of users are ignored. As a solution, we propose CnGAN, a novel multi-task learning based, encoder-GAN-recommender architecture. The proposed model synthetically generates source network user preferences for non-overlapped users by learning the mapping from target to source network preference manifolds. The resultant user preferences are used in a Siamese network based neural recommender architecture. Furthermore, we propose a novel user based pairwise loss function for recommendations using implicit interactions to better guide the generation process in the multi-task learning environment.We illustrate our solution by generating user preferences on the Twitter source network for recommendations on the YouTube target network. Extensive experiments show that the generated preferences can be used to improve recommendations for non-overlapped users. The resultant recommendations achieve superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art cross-network recommender solutions in terms of accuracy, novelty and diversity.


Exploring the use of Time-Dependent Cross-Network Information for Personalized Recommendations

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The overwhelming volume and complexity of information in online applications make recommendation essential for users to find information of interest. However, two major limitations that coexist in real world applications (1) incomplete user profiles, and (2) the dynamic nature of user preferences continue to degrade recommender quality in aspects such as timeliness, accuracy, diversity and novelty. To address both the above limitations in a single solution, we propose a novel cross-network time aware recommender solution. The solution first learns historical user models in the target network by aggregating user preferences from multiple source networks. Second, user level time aware latent factors are learnt to develop current user models from the historical models and conduct timely recommendations. We illustrate our solution by using auxiliary information from the Twitter source network to improve recommendations for the YouTube target network. Experiments conducted using multiple time aware and cross-network baselines under different time granularities show that the proposed solution achieves superior performance in terms of accuracy, novelty and diversity.


Add Alexa to your car for £39.99 with the Echo Auto at Amazon

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Hands-free news and entertainment has never been easier on-the-go thanks to the arrival of the first Amazon Echo device designed for use in the car. The Echo Auto launched back in June but if you've yet to trial it yourself, now might be the best time to invest as the device has gone into the Amazon End of Summer Sale, reduced from £49.99 down to £39.99. The Echo Auto allows drivers to play music, check the news and make calls without taking their hands off the wheel or eyes off the road. Add Alexa to your car with the new Echo Auto available on Amazon now for £39.99 Just like the rest of the Amazon Echo smart speaker range, the Echo Auto allows you to connect to Alexa. The device works through your phone's Alexa app and plays through your car's speakers via Bluetooth or an auxiliary input jack.