Google designers show their latest devices during a visit to its hardware studio where they designed the company's new Pixel 4 flagship phone, Pixel Go laptop, Pixel Buds wireless headphones, Nest Mini smart speaker and Nest Wifi system. Though the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL smartphones may be the stars of the Made by Google media event in New York City, a new and impressive smart speaker garnered quite a bit of chatter, too. Nest Mini ($49), which is about the size of a doughnut, has some improved hardware and software to go up against its primary competitor, Amazon Echo Dot. This diminutive smart speaker offers twice the bass as the original Google Home Mini, the company says. Indeed, the audio sounded fuller and louder than its predecessor when we cranked it up in a post-event demo session.

Today at its Google hardware event, Google introduced new mesh routers called Nest Wifi. This is a successor tot he Google Wifi product it introduced a couple of years ago, but with a number of improvements. The new Nest Wifi consists of two types of devices, one a router that plugs into your modem, and one'point' amplifies the signal and extends the network, and it's more powerful so you only need these two things. It's available to pre-order, and will ship on November 4. It comes in a 2-pack or a 3-pack variant, for $249 or $349 respectively, and will be available in eight countries at launch. Google says that Nest Wifi offers 2x better speed than Google Wifi, with up to 25% better coverage.

In this Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2019, photo New Pixel 4 phones are displayed at Google in Mountain View, Calif. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google unveiled a new Pixel smartphone and other hardware devices Tuesday, all aimed at getting people even more dependent on its artificial-intelligence services. The Pixel 4 phone promises to respond to AI queries even faster than before, while a home Wi-Fi system is getting the AI features for the first time. The company also unveiled a new smart speaker and wireless earbuds, both invoking the AI-powered Google Assistant. The Assistant, akin to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, is now available on more than 1 billion devices, including ones made by other manufacturers.

Fledgling gal-bots are the latest hires in the virtual assistant landscape. Meet Mia and Marge: two virtual assistants in the banking world – each brought into existence by women, both of whom carry deep institutional knowledge, subject matter expertise and long-standing credibility. UBank's Lee Hatton (Mia) and The Royal Bank of Scotland's (RBS) MaryAnn Fleming (Marge) are among 40 women who have been recognized as 2019's women leaders in A.I. by IBM. These leaders have succeeded in garnering acceptance of A.I. in the workplace, elevating their customers' experience and their companies' brands. It seems mortgage consumer complaints consistently surface around the loan application process according to UBank CEO, Lee Hatton.

The total installed base of devices with Artificial Intelligence (AI) will grow from 2.7 billion in 2019 to 4.5 billion in 2024, forecasts global tech market advisory firm, ABI Research. There are billions of petabytes of data flowing through these AI devices every day; the challenge now facing both technology companies and implementers is getting all these devices to learn, think, and work together. According to a recent whitepaper from ABI Research, Artificial Intelligence Meets Business Intelligence, multimodal learning is the key to making this happen, and it's fast becoming one of the most exciting -- and potentially transformative -- fields of artificial intelligence. "Multimodal learning consolidates disconnected, heterogeneous data from various sensors and data inputs into a single model," says ABI Research chief research officer Stuart Carlaw. "Learning-based methods that combine signals from different modalities can generate more robust inference, or even new insights, which would be impossible in a unimodal system."

Effective and efficient recommendation is crucial for modern e-commerce platforms. It consists of two indispensable components named Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction and Conversion Rate (CVR) prediction, where the latter is an essential factor contributing to the final purchasing volume. Existing methods specifically predict CVR using the clicked and purchased samples, which has limited performance affected by the well-known sample selection bias and data sparsity issues. To address these issues, we propose a novel deep CVR prediction method by considering the post-click behaviors. After grouping deterministic actions together, we construct a novel sequential path, which elaborately depicts the post-click behaviors of users. Based on the path, we define the CVR and several related probabilities including CTR, etc., and devise a deep neural network with multiple targets involved accordingly. It takes advantage of the abundant samples with deterministic labels derived from the post-click actions, leading to a significant improvement of CVR prediction. Extensive experiments on both offline and online settings demonstrate its superiority over representative state-of-the-art methods.

Addressing the non-uniform missing mechanism of rating feedback is critical to build a well-performing recommeder in the real-world systems. To tackle the challenging issue, we first define an ideal loss function that should be optimized to achieve the goal of recommendation. Then, we derive the generalization error bound of the ideal loss that alleviates the variance and the misspecification problems of the previous propensity-based methods. We further propose a meta-learning method minimizing the bound. Empirical evaluation using real-world datasets validates the theoretical findings and demonstrates the practical advantages of the proposed upper bound minimization approach.

Spooky jokes, eerie noises, and popular costume ideas--if you're looking for help celebrating Halloween on Thursday, Oct. 31, your smart speaker has your back. We've rounded up some of the top skills and ways Alexa and Google Assistant help you celebrate the creepiest day of the year. To enable these Halloween skills on your Echo, open the Amazon Alexa app, which is available for download on iOS and Android devices, tap "Skills and Games" in the menu, and search for the skill you want. For Google Home, you can find these actions in the Google Assistant app, which is also available for iOS and Android devices. From recipes ideas to trivia games, here are eight ways Alexa and Google Assistant can help you celebrate Halloween.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Oct. 14 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com The U.S. continues to see a rise in the number of sexually transmitted diseases, according to health officials -- and in Hawaii, the increase is believed to be linked to online dating. Health officials in the Aloha State have reported a significant increase in chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. All three of the infections were at or near their highest rates in about 30 years.

They might be competing AI's from giant companies, but Alexa and Google still play nice together. On Tuesday, Facebook will release its second generation Portal, one of three new entrants into the "Video Display" wars to compete for your shopping dollar during the holidays. Facebook is trying again to take on Google and Amazon, striving to convince consumers they want a home unit for making video calls, looking at their photos on a digital photo frame, listening to music and watching video clips. Plus, Facebook is going further by bringing the concept to TVs, but not until November. Here's how the three compare: The original edition launched in fall 2018, to surprisingly strong reviews: Critics were surprised they liked it, considering Facebook's poor history with privacy.