According to legend, Singer Vehicle Design founder and executive chairman Rob Dickinson was a young boy the first time his dad pointed out a Porsche 911. Dickinson turned that passion into a multi-million dollar business, reimagining classic Porsche models with his own twist. To be perfectly clear, Singer is not sponsored, approved, endorsed by, or in any way associated or affiliated with Porsche. Customers bring their own 911 to the Singer shop--not just any old 911, but an air-cooled 964 version model from 1989-1994--for a complete makeover. The cars are completely disassembled and modified around the original chassis with a process driven by Singer's obsessive attention to detail.

Kassem Fawaz's brother was on a videoconference with the microphone muted when he noticed that the microphone light was still on--indicating, inexplicably, that his microphone was being accessed. Alarmed, he asked Fawaz, an expert in online privacy and an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, to look into the issue. Fawaz and graduate student Yucheng Yang investigated whether this "mic-off-light-on" phenomenon was more widespread. They tried out many different videoconferencing applications on major operating systems, including iOS, Android, Windows and Mac, checking to see if the apps still accessed the microphone when it was muted. "It turns out, in the vast majority of cases, when you mute yourself, these apps do not give up access to the microphone," says Fawaz. "And that's a problem. When you're muted, people don't expect these apps to collect data."

The last time you called a customer service hotline and it asked you about what issues you are facing and was able to give you more information, did you ever wonder about how all that is working? Well, you don't have nothing to worry about at all as Khalil Faraj & I (Fawaz Siddiqi) are here to tell you about how you can make a Voice Agent with Twilio and Watson Assistant. On the 11th of October, Khalil and I conducted a webinar about how a voice activated chatbot is made and how easy are the steps to make it, we covered various technologies such as Watson Assistant, Watson Speech to Text, Watson Text to Speech, Watson Voice Agent and integrated them with Twilio and vice versa. In addition, we also talked about the pipeline of making a chatbot, on the conversational design as well as the steps involved and what things we should take care of when making a conversational design. The webinar was divided into two parts, the first part was conducted by myself (Fawaz), where I talked about what exactly are chatbots, the types of chatbots and how do they fit in as the last step into our AI cycle, and I would say that this is the final step since this is an external facing tool through which your customers/users can actually interact with the AI based capabilities within your solution and have a human-to-human like interaction (with amazing analytical skills) to get answers to their questions.

According to CNET, Nest has announced today that Marwan Fawaz will no longer be its CEO. As part of his departure, Nest will now be folded into Google's home and living room products team. In a joint interview with Fawaz, Rishi Chandra, vice president of product management for Google's home and living room products, said that the combination would make it easier for Google to integrate some of its machine learning technology and artificial intelligence into Nest products. This move comes six months after Nest merged with Google's hardware division. Nest co-founder Matt Rogers left soon after as well.

Alphabet is folding Nest, led by CEO Marwan Fawaz (right), into Google's hardware team, led by former Motorola executive Rick Osterloh (left). Google is bringing gadget maker Nest back under its control as the search giant battles rivals Amazon and Apple in the rapidly expanding smart home market. A big part of the change: Making it easier to add Google's artificial intelligence technology and Assistant -- a digital helper that competes against Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri -- into new Nest products. The world's largest search engine has staked its future on building Google smarts into devices beyond smartphones. On Wednesday, Google said Nest was part of its plans and would no longer operate as a separate division that lived in the outer orbit of parent company Alphabet's "Other Bets" group of projects.

"We have better light rings than any other products on the market," says Adam Mittleman. This is a sentence that I have never before heard uttered by anyone, even after a long time living on Planet Earth. But because I am visiting Nest, and Mittleman is its Head of Product Design, working on a new gadget that this startup-turned-controversial Alphabet division is launching, I can't say I am surprised. After all, light rings--the shimmering glow-circles that allow digital appliances to provide feedback--have been a leitmotif for Nest throughout its eventful journey of disrupting the home. Nest has given a lot of thought to them. Naturally, there is a light ring on the Nest Guard, which is the hub of the Nest Secure suite. That suite has been in the works since well before the company was acquired by Google in January 2014 and then underwent a second recalibration in October 2015 when Google made Nest one of the divisions ("bets") in the Alphabet archipelago. Depending on the message the new Nest Guard wants to convey, its ring might glow red, yellow or green.

Does your digital assistant know who it's talking to? A wearable device prototype could let voice-controlled assistants like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa recognise their owner so they don't take orders from anyone else. The VAuth device, developed at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, uses an accelerometer hidden in a pair of glasses or earphones or worn around the neck. The accelerometer measures vibrations created as the wearer speaks. An algorithm then compares those vibrations with the audio signal received by the digital assistant. If the vibrations and the audio match, then the voice command is received as normal.