The company is calling for 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) in damages and demands that Apple cease "manufacturing, using, promising to sell, selling, and importing" products that infringe on the patent, it said in a social media post. In the lawsuit filed in a local Chinese court, Xiao-i argued that Apple's voice-recognition technology Siri infringes on a patent that it applied for in 2004 and was granted in 2009. In a statement, Apple said that its Siri does not contain features included in the Xiao-i patent, which the iPhone maker argues relates to games and instant messaging. The company also said that independent appraisers certified by the Supreme People's Court have concluded that Apple does not infringe Xiao-i Robot's technology. "We are disappointed Xiao-i Robot has filed another lawsuit," Apple said in a statement.

And then there are really bad dates. A Washington state woman with a pink taser was arrested on Tuesday after she was accused of trying to hold up a man she had met online, Boston police said. Selena Rivera-Apodaca, 24, of Kent, Wash., is expected to be arraigned in Boston Municipal Court on Wednesday on a charge of armed robbery. Shortly before noon on Tuesday, officers went to the Hyatt Regency Hotel at 1 Avenue De LaFayette in response to a radio call about an armed robbery. When they arrived, police said, officers were met by a man who said he had met a woman on an online dating app.

Bitcoin mining and dating apps are now banned in government-issued mobile devices in the United States Marine Corps. Citing privacy and security concerns, marines are also not allowed to install gambling apps or jailbreak their phones, according to a memo signed July 20. The marines are advised to check the list of prohibited apps and delete them. Additionally, they are advised to watch out for any application that records video or voice, monitors GPS, or access the user's contacts or calendars. These are risks, the memo said, that could disclose location or any important security information that should always be private.

Follow up on my previous post discussing the key technologies around the conversational AI solution, I will be dive into the typical challenges the AI Engineer team would encounter when building a virtual agent or a chatbot solution for your clients or customers. Let firstly define the scope and goal of the conversational application. The conversational agents can be categorized into two main streams. The typical agents for Open Domain Conversation are Siri, Google Assistant, BlenderBot from Facebook, Meena from Google. Users can start a conversation without a clear goal, and the topics are unrestricted.

When it comes to dimensionality reduction, the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a popular method in linear algebra for matrix factorization in machine learning. Such a method shrinks the space dimension from N-dimension to K-dimension (where K N) and reduces the number of features. SVD constructs a matrix with the row of users and columns of items and the elements are given by the users' ratings.

Modeling user preferences (long-term history) and user dynamics (short-term history) is of greatest importance to build efficient sequential recommender systems. The challenge lies in the successful combination of the whole user's history and his recent actions (sequential dynamics) to provide personalized recommendations. Existing methods capture the sequential dynamics of a user using fixed-order Markov chains (usually first order chains) regardless of the user, which limits both the impact of the past of the user on the recommendation and the ability to adapt its length to the user profile. In this article, we propose to use frequent sequences to identify the most relevant part of the user history for the recommendation. The most salient items are then used in a unified metric model that embeds items based on user preferences and sequential dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art, especially on sparse datasets. We show that considering sequences of varying lengths improves the recommendations and we also emphasize that these sequences provide explanations on the recommendation.

As part of a perennial project, our team is actively engaged in developing new synthetic assistant (SA) technologies to assist in training combat medics and medical first responders. It is critical that medical first responders are well trained to deal with emergencies more effectively. This would require real-time monitoring and feedback for each trainee. Therefore, we introduced a voice-based SA to augment the training process of medical first responders and enhance their performance in the field. The potential benefits of SAs include a reduction in training costs and enhanced monitoring mechanisms. Despite the increased usage of voice-based personal assistants (PAs) in day-to-day life, the associated effects are commonly neglected for a study of human factors. Therefore, this paper focuses on performance analysis of the developed voice-based SA in emergency care provider training for a selected emergency treatment scenario. The research discussed in this paper follows design science in developing proposed technology; at length, we discussed architecture and development and presented working results of voice-based SA. The empirical testing was conducted on two groups as user studies using statistical analysis tools, one trained with conventional methods and the other with the help of SA. The statistical results demonstrated the amplification in training efficacy and performance of medical responders powered by SA. Furthermore, the paper also discusses the accuracy and time of task execution (t) and concludes with the guidelines for resolving the identified problems.

Dallas-based Match operates several dating apps, including Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, as well as its namesake brand. The company in July completed its separation from IAC/InterActiveCorp., which previously owned a roughly 80% stake. Match released video-chatting features for its apps in the spring as users started avoiding traditional dating spots such as bars and restaurants. The company is now in the beginning stages of developing features such as games and icebreakers to make those one-on-one video calls more engaging--part of a broader strategy to find new ways to generate revenue from its millions of users, according to Chief Financial Officer Gary Swidler. "We've got a lot of users, and I think there's more we can do with them," said Mr. Swidler, who is also Match's chief operating officer.

Best Buy might be your ticket if you're looking to get started on a smart home and want better sound than you usually get from smart speakers. The retailer is running a promo that gives Echo Studio buyers a free Echo Show 5 for the same $200 it normally costs to get the Studio alone. This could give you a superb-sounding Alexa speaker in the living room while providing a connected alarm clock for the bedroom or kitchen. The Echo Studio is relatively large and benefits the most if you use a high-resolution streaming service like Amazon Music HD, but it's a bargain as far as premium smart speakers go. It produces a balanced, rich sound if you use the Stereo Spatial Enhancement feature.

The promise of conversational AI is that, unlike virtually any other form of technology, all you have to do is talk. Natural language is the most natural and democratic form of communication. After all, humans are born capable of learning how to speak, but some never learn to read or use a graphical user interface. That's why AI researchers from Element AI, Stanford University, and CIFAR recommend academic researchers take steps to create more useful forms of AI that speak with people to get things done, including the elimination of existing benchmarks. "As many current [language user interface] benchmarks suffer from low ecological validity, we recommend researchers not to initiate incremental research projects on them. Benchmark-specific advances are less meaningful when it is unclear if they transfer to real LUI use cases. Instead, we suggest the community to focus on conceptual research ideas that can generalize well beyond the current datasets," the paper reads.