Apple is going to update its AirPods this fall, introducing new noise cancelling technology and a price point that's $60 higher than the previous version. The new model of the wireless earbuds could arrive as soon as the end of the month, and will be branded as AirPods Pro. The Pro version of the earbuds will retail for $260, while the current non-Pro version of will continue to sell for $199. According to Cnet, the addition would leave Apple selling two different noise-cancelling headphones this fall, following on the announcement of Beats Solo Pro earlier this week. The new AirPods were first discovered by Guilherme Rambo of 9to5Mac as he was looking for secrets in the code of the recent iOS 13.2 update.

"Mia" is the virtual assistant introduced by Australian digital bank Ubank in February 2019. These aren't the members of a new, all-female rock group, but names that several large banks have been giving to their automated digital assistants. So-called chatbots have become a useful cost-cutting tools for companies with large subscriber bases (think banks, insurance firms and mobile phone operators). As they replace human call-center workers, such bots will help save banks an estimated $7.3 billion in operational costs by 2023, Juniper Research predicts. But the proliferation of bots with female names raises questions about whether they might also perpetuate gender stereotypes, particularly around the notion of women in the role of assistants.

As far as the impact of AI and Machine Learning on the modern world is constantly growing and changing every industry - from Education to Robotics and Heavy machinery, there is no doubt that tomorrow will be revolutionized by these two areas of computer science. Many cutting-edge inventions have already been made so far: Personal Assistants with a high level of human language understanding as Siri and Alexa, self-driving Tesla cars, IBM's Watson (won against 2 best performers at the Jeopardy show), autonomous weapons, dancing NAO Robots (2010 World Expo) and more. Numbers talk louder then simple words, so let's take a look at some predicted statistics of AI in business for next 5 years: By 2025 the whole AI market that was only $1.6 billion 4 years ago, will be around $60 billion and the world's GDP will rise by $15 trillion before 2030 because of AI. The intensively rising number of AI startups has been noticed since last two decades - at about 14 times more, than it was, and equivalently the amount of investments in this area also grew almost 6 times. Data Scientists from Google assume that only in the next year(2020) robots will manage to imitate complicated human behaviour and emotions like flirting or making fun of somebody.

From machine learning and AI right through to securing the IoT, here are five things we learned about at this year's event, which took place in Lisbon on October 14. Have you ever thought about how many decisions machines have made today? Or how many of those decisions were based on gender, race, or background? Chances are you don't even realize just how many decisions are made by artificial intelligence instead of a human. Kriti Sharma, Founder of AI for Good, explained that algorithms are being used all the time to make decisions about who we are and what we want.

Right now you can get the Google Assistant to start listening to you with a button push, or by saying "hey Google", or by squeezing the sides of your phone – but the Pixel 4 series is being tipped to introduce a new way of activating the app. According to 9to5Google, a new'raise to talk' option is in development, where you only need to lift up your phone and start talking to use Google Assistant. The voice interaction will need to happen right after you lift the phone, apparently, and the necessary voice match processing is carried out on the device itself – so other people won't be able to get at the feature just by picking your phone up. However, it's not certain that'raise to talk' for Google Assistant will be ready in time for the Pixel 4 launch on October 15 – it might be that the functionality gets pushed out as an update at a later date. We know that an improved Google Assistant is on the way, because Google showed off some of its features – including a more intuitive way of continuing a conversation with the app – at the Google IO event back in May.

Almost everyone with a personal computer carries a piece of artificial intelligence (AI) interface in the form of Siri or Cortana. If not, you might have interacted with one on your smartphone today. These are the most common touchpoints between consumers and AI. Needless to say, that is just the tip of the iceberg. AI penetration has been impactful in B2B setups or at the back-end of many services that we use every day.

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read Wirecutter's continuously updated list of deals here. Down to $65 from a street price of $90, this is the first deal we've seen on the recently released Echo Show 5. We may see better deals over deals events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but at the moment, this $25 discount is well worth a second look if you're interested in the latest Alexa smart display. We have yet to test the Echo Show 5 and report our thoughts in our guide to the best smart display for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, but if you're an Alexa user looking for the latest tech, this is the latest version of our top pick.

For conversational AI and virtual assistants to communicate with humans in a realistic way, they must exhibit human characteristics such as expression of emotion and personality. Current attempts toward constructing human-like dialogue agents have presented significant difficulties. We propose Human Level Attributes (HLAs) based on tropes as the basis of a method for learning dialogue agents that can imitate the personalities of fictional characters. Tropes are characteristics of fictional personalities that are observed recurrently and determined by viewers' impressions. By combining detailed HLA data with dialogue data for specific characters, we present a dataset that models character profiles and gives dialogue agents the ability to learn characters' language styles through their HLAs. We then introduce a three-component system, ALOHA (which stands for Artificial Learning On Human Attributes), that combines character space mapping, character community detection, and language style retrieval to build a character (or personality) specific language model. Our preliminary experiments demonstrate that ALOHA, combined with our proposed dataset, can outperform baseline models at identifying correct dialogue responses of any chosen target character, and is stable regardless of the character's identity, genre of the show, and context of the dialogue.

Researchers at the University of Washington have devised a new app for smart speakers like Amazon's Echo to help parents monitor their baby's breathing. Called BreathJunior, the experimental app will be able to measure the rate of a baby's breathing and detect symptoms of sleep apnea. The team initially conducted a test of the device with five babies in the neonatal intensive care unit at a hospital in Washington. BreathJunior (pictured above) is an experimental app that monitors a baby's breathing using a smart speaker According to a report from MIT Tech Review, the team plans to eventually release the app as a commercial product via the company Sound Life Sciences. But first, they'll present the results of the trial at the upcoming MobiCom, a yearly conference on mobile computing in Los Cabos, Mexico.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already a huge player in host of industries. In the past few decades, it has transformed from the subject of science fiction into a real phenomenon that affects our daily lives. AI's purpose is to make the lives of human beings easier, by performing tasks efficiently at speeds that would be extremely hard, if not impossible, for humans to emulate. Some types of AI are extremely user-oriented, while others are more geared toward for use within computer systems and programs, for applications involving assets like big data. On the user-friendly side of the spectrum, you will find devices like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, the digital assistants.