You ever get the feeling no one is actually listening to you? Because if they were listening, you wouldn't have to constantly repeat everything you've said. Well, Google Home is your answer to that frustration. Because Google Home is always listening. No, Google home is more just… there.

Not all voice assistants can handle the same requests. We put Siri, Alexa and Google to the test. Gone are the days when you'd write a note on a piece of paper to remind someone to do something. Instead, you now leave reminders on your smart speaker. Google Assistant devices in the U.S., U.K. and Australia will get an upgrade over the next few weeks to allow you to set reminders for other people.

As competition for top talent in every industry heats up, an award-winning AI assistant named Olivia is stepping in to help recruiters and job candidates speed past antiquated hiring norms. The brainchild of Aaron Matos, co-founder and CEO of Paradox, Olivia is entirely mobile and relies on text messaging to compress the timespan between screening qualified people and hiring dates. "The assistant's job is to get work done, and that's what Olivia focuses on," said Matos. This frees up the recruiter's time for more valuable responsibilities, like talking face-to-face with qualified candidates." Paradox was born out of Matos' obsession with people's feelings about work. "When people love their work, they build great teams and companies can accomplish great things," he said. "I went into HR with that as my mission -- to figure out how to get people to love their work.

Employers can now practice laying off an ultra-realistic, AI-powered virtual employee in order to develop their soft skills before they have to fire someone in real life. Capable of realistically engaging trainees in conversation and displaying appropriate emotions, poor virtual employee Barry Thompson gets the sack over and over again. However, his reaction -- which can range from calm acceptance to angry and defensive shouting -- varies depending on the user's handing of the scenario. The firm who created Barry have also developed a number of other virtual training scenarios, from negotiation and making sales to giving feedback to subordinates. Barry is a virtual employee created by Talespin Studios.

The collaborative ranking problem has been an important open research question as most recommendation problems can be naturally formulated as ranking problems. While much of collaborative ranking methodology assumes static ranking data, the importance of temporal information to improving ranking performance is increasingly apparent. Recent advances in deep learning, especially the discovery of various attention mechanisms and newer architectures in addition to widely used RNN and CNN in natural language processing, have allowed us to make better use of the temporal ordering of items that each user has engaged with. In particular, the SASRec model, inspired by the popular Transformer model in natural languages processing, has achieved state-of-art results in the temporal collaborative ranking problem and enjoyed more than 10x speed-up when compared to earlier CNN/RNN-based methods. However, SASRec is inherently an un-personalized model and does not include personalized user embeddings. To overcome this limitation, we propose a Personalized Transformer (SSE-PT) model, outperforming SASRec by almost 5% in terms of NDCG@10 on 5 real-world datasets. Furthermore, after examining some random users' engagement history and corresponding attention heat maps used during the inference stage, we find our model is not only more interpretable but also able to focus on recent engagement patterns for each user. Moreover, our SSE-PT model with a slight modification, which we call SSE-PT++, can handle extremely long sequences and outperform SASRec in ranking results with comparable training speed, striking a balance between performance and speed requirements. Code and data are open sourced at https://github.com/wuliwei9278/SSE-PT.

Facebook Inc. has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe clips of audio from users of its services, according to people with knowledge of the work. Facebook has reportedly been paying contractors to transcribe the audio chats of users on its various platforms. According to Bloomberg, which cites people with knowledge of the work, contractors were given audio clips with no context of where they were obtained and told to transcribe them. Facebook told Bloomberg the users affected by this agreed to have voice chats transcribed through its Messenger app. "Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago," said Facebook in a statement to USA TODAY.

Alexa can read you the latest headlines, give you the weather forecast, and help you find a recipe to make for dinner, but did you know that your Echo device can also assist your student with homework? If you have an Amazon Echo smart speaker at home, like our favorite Echo device, the Echo (2nd Generation), your student has access to a wealth of brain-sharpening, knowledge-enhancing activities to help tackle homework assignments. While kids probably don't need more time interacting with electronics, Alexa offers a variety of skills that can help students with their homework when parents aren't available. To enable a skill on your Echo device say, "Alexa, enable [exact name of skill]." Or, open the Alexa app, tap the menu button, and select "Skills."

LAS VEGAS – The Tencent Blade Team of researchers demonstrated several ways they have developed to hack and run remote code on Google Home smart speakers. The hacks center around what is known as a Magellan vulnerability, which can be used to exploit the massively popular SQLite database engine. Here at a session at DEF CON on Thursday, the researchers shed light on their work "breaking" Google Home. What made the talk unique wasn't necessarily that Google Home smart speakers could be compromised using Megellan – that was public news in Dec. 2018 – rather it was how the hack was pulled off. On stage Tencent researchers Wenxiang Qian, YuXiang Li and HuiYu Wu laid out the evolution of their research.

Facebook has become the latest company to admit that human contractors listened to recordings of users without their knowledge, a practice the company now says has been "paused". Citing contractors who worked on the project, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday that the company hired people to listen to audio conversations carried out on Facebook Messenger. The practice involved users who had opted in Messenger to have their voice chats transcribed, the company said. The contractors were tasked with re-transcribing the conversations in order to gauge the accuracy of the automatic transcription tool. "Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago," a Facebook spokesperson told the Guardian.

The two companies have butted heads for years, and it's likely they'll continue to do so--Spotify's protest web page (in which Spotify details accusations that Apple engages in anticompetitive behavior) is just one example of hurt feelings. But despite the mutual dislike, Apple and Spotify are reportedly in talks to integrate Spotify more tightly with Siri, Apple's digital assistant. The companies are "discussing a plan" that would let iPhone users ask Siri to play music with Spotify, instead of requiring them to manually navigate to whatever song, album, or playlist they want to hear via the third-party app. The Information's report on this handy potential change cites three anonymous sources who are "familiar with the discussions." Neither company confirmed the report when contacted by Fast Company.