After more than a month of sporadic outages that left many Sengled smart bulb users struggling to control their lights, Amazon has opted to pull the skill that allowed Sengled users to control their bulbs with Alexa. Some Sengled bulbs may still offer Alexa control directly via Zigbee, Matter, or Bluetooth connectivity, thus bypassing the yanked Alexa skill. But Sengled bulbs that can't be connected directly to Alexa will no longer be controllable via the voice assistant, Amazon said. Sengled lights and devices may still be controllable using the Sengled app or other smart home platforms, although the status of those connections still appears to be spotty. "We hold a high bar for the Alexa experience," an Amazon spokesperson told TechHive.

Age: Born 6 November 2014. Appearance: Back then, like a dehumidifier that spied on you; now more of an invisible, all-knowing presence. You mean the woman who tells me the football scores? Yes, that Alexa – Amazon's ubiquitous virtual assistant, voiced by a speech synthesiser and powered by weak AI. What about her? It's the end of the year, so time for Amazon to reveal the questions Britons most often asked Alexa in 2023.

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If you've got an Amazon Echo speaker, you already know how much fun having Alexa at your fingertips can be despite the risk to your privacy and security. Whether playing music, answering random questions, or venting your frustrations, Alexa has become a part of your daily routine. Did you know, however, that it can do so much more? There are some seriously cool Alexa skills out there that can elevate your Echo speaker to a whole new level of intelligence. CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER First, we have the "Ask My Buddy" skill, perfect for those who live alone or need assistance. With this skill, you can easily ask Alexa to notify a designated contact during an emergency, such as a fall or medical issue.

Britain will struggle to fill the jobs of the future if computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) are not made part of the school curriculum, research has warned. Demand for jobs that require such skills is estimated to rise by 40% over the next five years - but with only 15% of UK businesses having adopted AI, a report says the country risks falling behind. Research by Capital Economics suggests teaching AI skills in secondary schools may help fill rising demand for computer science and other such roles, supporting an average of £71bn of economic output annually to 2030. According to YouGov, 72% of secondary school teachers support making an active effort to increase education and resources around AI and computer science. But among STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers surveyed, 64% had limited access to computer science resources - rising to 79% when focused on AI.

Structured and unstructured data and facts about drugs, genes, protein, viruses, and their mechanism are spread across a huge number of scientific articles. These articles are a large-scale knowledge source and can have a huge impact on disseminating knowledge about the mechanisms of certain biological processes. A knowledge graph (KG) can be constructed by integrating such facts and data and be used for data integration, exploration, and federated queries. However, exploration and querying large-scale KGs is tedious for certain groups of users due to a lack of knowledge about underlying data assets or semantic technologies. A question-answering (QA) system allows the answer of natural language questions over KGs automatically using triples contained in a KG. Recently, the use and adaption of digital assistants are getting wider owing to their capability at enabling users to voice commands to control smart systems or devices. This paper is about using Amazon Alexa's voice-enabled interface for QA over KGs. As a proof-of-concept, we use the well-known DisgeNET KG, which contains knowledge covering 1.13 million gene-disease associations between 21,671 genes and 30,170 diseases, disorders, and clinical or abnormal human phenotypes. Our study shows how Alex could be of help to find facts about certain biological entities from large-scale knowledge bases.

Conversation as an interface is the best way for machines to interact with us using the universally accepted human tool that is language. Chatbots and voice user interfaces are two flavors of conversational UIs. Chatbots are real-time, data-driven answer engines that talk in natural language and are context-aware. Voice user interfaces are driven by voice and can understand and respond to users using speech. This book covers both types of conversational UIs by leveraging APIs from multiple platforms.

Many households include children who use voice personal assistants (VPA) such as Amazon Alexa. Children benefit from the rich functionalities of VPAs and third-party apps but are also exposed to new risks in the VPA ecosystem. In this paper, we first investigate "risky" child-directed voice apps that contain inappropriate content or ask for personal information through voice interactions. We build SkillBot - a natural language processing (NLP)-based system to automatically interact with VPA apps and analyze the resulting conversations. We find 28 risky child-directed apps and maintain a growing dataset of 31,966 non-overlapping app behaviors collected from 3,434 Alexa apps. Our findings suggest that although child-directed VPA apps are subject to stricter policy requirements and more intensive vetting, children remain vulnerable to inappropriate content and privacy violations. We then conduct a user study showing that parents are concerned about the identified risky apps. Many parents do not believe that these apps are available and designed for families/kids, although these apps are actually published in Amazon's "Kids" product category. We also find that parents often neglect basic precautions such as enabling parental controls on Alexa devices. Finally, we identify a novel risk in the VPA ecosystem: confounding utterances, or voice commands shared by multiple apps that may cause a user to interact with a different app than intended. We identify 4,487 confounding utterances, including 581 shared by child-directed and non-child-directed apps. We find that 27% of these confounding utterances prioritize invoking a non-child-directed app over a child-directed app. This indicates that children are at real risk of accidentally invoking non-child-directed apps due to confounding utterances.

Roomba owners have been able to control their vacuums with Alexa voice commands since 2017, but that experience is pretty basic. You can tell your robot vacuum to start and stop cleaning, or to set up a schedule, but the entire interaction is, well, robotic. That changes today with iRobot's latest Alexa Skill, which taps into the company's Genius software platform to deliver smarter and more conversational voice commands. You'll be able to tell Wi-Fi connected Roombas to clean around specific objects, and you can schedule cleaning jobs without sounding like you're inputting a computer program. As iRobot CEO Colin Angle tells us, the Alexa Skill is one of the most complex ever created.

Walsh Middle School seventh grader Aariv Modi has always had a fascination for technology, especially his parent's Alexa device. "I loved the idea of just speaking to a device that it could allow you to play music, listen to the news, and it seemed futuristic to me," Aariv said. In April, Aariv was recognized as the Voice/AI Pioneer of the Year by Project Voice for his contributions to the conversational artificial intelligence industry. During the COVID-19 lockdown, he taught hundreds of kids how to make Alexa do things it isn't programmed to do through webinars, camps and posts on his blog that is available online. "In this generation, as kids are growing up, they are being exposed to technology and learning things in ways that we never thought was possible," said Bradley Metrock, CEO of Score Publishing, which organizes the Project Voice conference.