If you ever feel like Gen Z is speaking an entirely different language, you are definitely not alone. Luckily for all the baffled parents out there, a new Alexa update should help you avoid giving your kids the ick with your sus Gen Z slang. From today, Amazon users will be able to ask Alexa to'talk Gen Z to me' to reveal one of 20 phrases using Gen Z's favourite words. That might include phrases such as'the math isn't mathing' which Alexa defines as'something is incorrect or unreasonable, something doesn't add up or make sense'. And as Amazon's survey of 2,385 Britons reveals that 83 per cent of Gen Z say the older generation fails to understand them, a little extra assistance might be welcome.

Smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Alexa could be used by criminals to listen to and decipher a password or PIN being typed in on a nearby phone. Researchers from the University of Cambridge built their own version of a smart speaker to closely resemble those which are commercially available. Sound recordings from the gadget were inputted into a computer for analysis and experts investigated if the sound and vibrations caused by typing on a smartphone screen could be used to guess a five-digit passcode. When the phone was placed within 20cm (7.8inches) of the custom-built device, the computer was able to guess the code with 76 per cent accuracy in three attempts. This graphic outlines the general flow of the experiment.

A human can likely tell the difference between a turtle and a rifle. For quite some time, a subset of computer science research has been dedicated to better understanding how machine-learning models handle these "adversarial" attacks, which are inputs deliberately created to trick or fool machine-learning algorithms. While much of this work has focused on speech and images, recently, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) tested the boundaries of text. They came up with "TextFooler," a general framework that can successfully attack natural language processing (NLP) systems -- the types of systems that let us interact with our Siri and Alexa voice assistants -- and "fool" them into making the wrong predictions. One could imagine using TextFooler for many applications related to internet safety, such as email spam filtering, hate speech flagging, or "sensitive" political speech text detection -- which are all based on text classification models.

About 26.2 percent of American households have a smart speaker. It can play NPR and tell you the weather. It can even read your kids a bedtime story. But some parents have expressed concern that as their kids start asking smart speakers for things, those kids might turn into "demanding little twerps." Or voice assistants will give inappropriate information.

Smart speakers are becoming more and more common inside of homes, offering a convenient way to get the weather, manage your calendar, and answer any questions you may have. But this year, your Amazon Echo can also help you prepare for the upcoming flu season. Conceptualized and developed by Seattle Children's Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital, the Flu Doctor skill provides a convenient way to educate yourself (and your family) about the flu vaccine. "We know that search is increasingly going to be voice-enabled and we know increasingly more and more of us are incorporating smart speakers into our lives," Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson, general pediatrician and Chief of Digital Innovation at Seattle Children's Hospital, tells Reviewed. "The benefit of Flu Doctor is to learn more about the flu in your home, in a way that maybe you hadn't before using Alexa."

Time: 8 am San Francisco / 11 am New York / 4 pm London Duration: 1 hour including live Q&A Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are focusing their attention on artificial intelligence (AI) and investing heavily to improve virtual assistance and voice recognition applications. But massive volume growth and commoditization will lead to ever-changing component prices, longer lead times and, ultimately, device prices that could leave these assistants sitting idle on store shelves. So what's a smart speaker manufacturer or integrator to do? Join our Tech Convergence, Disruption, and Benchmarking (CDB) webcast, that's what! From components to performance and cost benchmarking, join us for a webcast on AI's hottest application - the digital assistant.

Editor's note: This story is the first installment in a monthly series looking at some of the biggest investments grocers and food companies are making. Previous articles sponsored by BMO Harris Bank can be found here. "Hey Google, set my alarm for 8:30 a.m. These are among the most common demands and questions for voice-controlled personal assistants and smart speakers. But once consumers say "Alexa, order me bananas, Honey Nut Cheerios and a loaf of bread," difficulties arise. Conversational commerce, as it is called, is still in its infancy across all industries, Jon Reily, vice president of commerce strategy at Publicis.Sapient, told Grocery Dive. Every retailer, from department stores to grocers, is trying to figure out how best to use it, he said. But food retailers do have an advantage, Reily noted. Unlike other verticals like clothing stores where all products need to be seen before purchasing, much of grocery shopping is replenishment of items like cereal, cat litter, ...

We're learning an important lesson about cutting-edge voice technology: Amazon's Alexa is always listening. Putting live microphones in our homes has always been an out-there idea. But tech companies successfully marketed talking speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home to millions by assuring they only record us when we give a "wake word." That turns out to be a misnomer. These devices are always "awake," passively listening for the command to activate, such as "Alexa," "O.K. Google," or "Hey Siri."

We're learning an important lesson about cutting-edge voice technology: Amazon's Alexa is always listening. Putting live microphones in our homes has always been an out-there idea. But tech companies successfully marketed talking speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home to millions by assuring they only record us when we give a "wake word." That turns out to be a misnomer. These devices are always "awake," passively listening for the command to activate, such as "Alexa," "O.K. Google," or "Hey Siri."

VID Cisco will shortly give the world a voice assistant it believes has a shot at making life uncomfortable for Siri, Cortana and Alexa in the office. The company's effort won't be a general-purpose bot. Instead the company plans to make it a part of its Spark collaboration portfolio and have it do things like place calls, find documents and open meetings. The assistant was announced in November 2017, but The Reg today beheld a live demo of the tool at Cisco Live in Melbourne. Forgive us the shot-on-a-phone handheld footage, but here's what Cisco feels is fit for public consumption.