We are living in an era where messaging apps deal with all sorts of our daily activities, and in fact, these apps have already overtaken social networks as can be indicated in the BI Intelligence Report. In addition to this clear point, the consumption of messaging platforms is further expected to grow significantly in the coming years; hence this is a huge opportunity for different businesses to gain attention where people are actively engaged. In this age of instant gratification, consumers expect companies to respond to them quickly without any delay, and this, of course, requires a lot of time and effort for the company to hire and invest in their workforce. Thus, it's now the right time for any organization to think of new ways to stay connected with the end-user. Many organizations undergoing a digital transformation have already started harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence in the form of AI-assisted Customer Support System, Talent Screening using AI-assisted interviews, etc.

User behavior data in recommender systems are driven by the complex interactions of many latent factors behind the users' decision making processes. The factors are highly entangled, and may range from high-level ones that govern user intentions, to low-level ones that characterize a user's preference when executing an intention. Learning representations that uncover and disentangle these latent factors can bring enhanced robustness, interpretability, and controllability. However, learning such disentangled representations from user behavior is challenging, and remains largely neglected by the existing literature. In this paper, we present the MACRo-mIcro Disentangled Variational Auto-Encoder (MacridVAE) for learning disentangled representations from user behavior. Our approach achieves macro disentanglement by inferring the high-level concepts associated with user intentions (e.g., to buy a shirt or a cellphone), while capturing the preference of a user regarding the different concepts separately. A micro-disentanglement regularizer, stemming from an information-theoretic interpretation of VAEs, then forces each dimension of the representations to independently reflect an isolated low-level factor (e.g., the size or the color of a shirt). Empirical results show that our approach can achieve substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines. We further demonstrate that the learned representations are interpretable and controllable, which can potentially lead to a new paradigm for recommendation where users are given fine-grained control over targeted aspects of the recommendation lists.

NEW YORK – Apple is resuming the use of humans to review Siri commands and dictation with the latest iPhone software update. In August, Apple suspended the practice and apologized for the way it used people, rather than just machines, to review the audio. While common in the tech industry, the practice undermined Apple's attempts to position itself as a trusted steward of privacy. CEO Tim Cook repeatedly has declared the company's belief that "privacy is a fundamental human right," a phrase that cropped up again in Apple's apology. Now, Apple is giving consumers notice when installing the update, iOS 13.2.

The current iPhone upgrade to iOS 13.2 brings a variety of features, not the least of which is improved privacy for those who use Siri. Responding to the outcry over how it handles the data collected by its voice assistant, Apple has offered users a way to delete all of the recordings that Siri collects during use. The company has also stopped sharing audio recordings with human staffers in order to improve its service. Instead, it asks you to opt in to that feature via a pop-up that appears when you upgrade to this latest version of its mobile operating system. If you were too quick to opt in when you upgraded and have decided you don't want to share your voice with Apple (or if you opted out and have decided that you don't mind if a few Apple employees listen to your voice), you can easily change your mind. In addition, you can now ask Apple to delete all of your audio information from Siri (which used to be a very convoluted and unsure process).

Get great prices on the things you actually want. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. In my opinion, there couldn't be anything more exciting than waking up to a great deal on a product you actually want. And this morning, I woke up to several on Amazon.

On the heels of several new acquisitions and product announcements in recent months, Motorola Solutions is announcing a new radio equipped with a voice assistant, which the company says is the first of its kind. The public safety radio is called APX NEXT, building upon the company's prior APX two-way radios, and the virtual assistant that controls it has been dubbed ViQi (pronounced "Vicky"). The company's news release on Thursday said the radio is FirstNet-ready, built with LTE connectivity, and is the first APX radio to feature a touchscreen, designed for field use including with rain or gloves. Motorola Solutions Chief Technology Officer Mahesh Saptharishi said that besides being able to control the radio, the virtual assistant responds to commands like "ViQi, run a license plate," and can also look up driver's license information and vehicle identification numbers. He said other functions will come with future updates.

In the battle of the buds, our "taste test" was striking. A friend and I both compared listening to the Foo Fighters "Learn to Fly" on Amazon's new Echo Buds and the product it aims to emulate, what Apple calls the best-selling headphone "in the world," the AirPods. The Amazon product "sounded tinnier," said Jan Schreiber, a Laguna Beach, California-based photographer. The AirPods had richer bass and a fuller sound. We switched to other songs, and the verdict didn't change.

Tinder, the most popular dating app in the world, has banned teens under the age of 18 but it's not stopping them from signing up. A jilted Australian doctor pleaded guilty Monday to sending 9,000 abusive and threatening messages to her former Tinder date, according to a new report. Radiologist Denise Jane Lee, 40, of Sydney, copped to four of 10 charges against her ahead of a scheduled five-day hearing in the Downing Centre Local Court, the Australian Associated Press reported. Lee, who was arrested in February 2017, copped to three counts of using a carriage service to harass, menace or offend and one count of intimidation, according to the report. Six additional charges were withdrawn.

AI will grow into a $118.6 billion industry by 2025. That isn't something you should take lightly. AI has become an integral part of our everyday lives. When we ask Alexa to play our favorite song, use Google Maps to find our way to a new Chinese restaurant, or even use portrait mode to take pictures of our friends – we're adopting AI without even realizing it. Indeed, the way we carry out generic tasks has shifted far beyond our imagination since the rise of AI.

Digital agencies today are brimming with ideas that can help brands integrate with voice-enabled technology. For Niraj Ruparel, National Head- Mobile, Mindshare India, conversational commerce using voice skill technology in India means serious business. In conversation with exchange4media, he delves into the nuances of voice technology, how brands can ensure that voice interaction for users is a seamless experience and what is working in the favour of Voice as the next big digital trend. The agency's tryst with voice began in January this year, explains Ruparel after global giants Google and Amazon recognised the potential for voice in India. "Voice is pretty big in Tier 2 markets, which is in terms of the penetration or how we reach out to audiences in the rural market. If you talk about the ecosystem per se, we're talking about close to 100 crore active sim cards in India and almost 450 million sim cards are resting on feature phones where the only mode of communication is Voice, so that plays a dominant role there. But now we see those 550 million SIMs which are sitting on 400 million smartphones, 30 per cent of those people have now started querying on Voice Assistants."