In Tuesday's newsletter, I laid out how to watch (and what to expect from) Amazon's Alexa press event. But aside from unveiling what Alexa will be capable of, there was no silly hardware and no upgraded Echos, but lots of demos. We learned Alexa will be included with an Amazon Prime subscription, and the company will also offer the enhanced digital assistant separately, for 20 per month. Meanwhile, Apple's new entry-level iPhone, the 16e, launches online and in stores today. The 599 phone is arguably 100 too expensive, but it packs a processor that can deliver Apple Intelligence to the masses.

I bought an iPhone 15 the other day to replace my five-year-old iPhone 11. The phone is powered by the new A17 Pro chip and has a terabyte of data storage and accordingly was eye-wateringly expensive. I had, of course, finely honed rationales for splashing out on such a scale. I've always had a policy of writing only about kit that I buy with my own money (no freebies from tech companies), for example. The fancy A17 processor is needed to run the new "AI" stuff that Apple is promising to launch soon; the phone has a significantly better camera than my old handset had – which matters (to me) because my Substack blog goes out three times a week and I provide a new photograph for each edition; and, finally, a friend whose ancient iPhone is on its last legs might appreciate an iPhone 11 in good nick.

On Wednesday, a San Francisco-based developer named Liu Liu released Draw Things: AI Generation, a free app available in the App Store that lets iPhone owners run the popular Stable Diffusion AI image generator. Type in a description, and the app generates an image within several minutes. It's a notable step toward bringing image synthesis to a wider audience--with the added privacy of running it on your own hardware. Introduced in August, Stable Diffusion (SD) is an AI image generator model that creates novel images from text descriptions (called "prompts"). Typically, people run SD through the commercial DreamStudio service, on a remote cloud machine with rented compute time, or locally on a PC using a custom open source implementation.

E-commerce queries are often short and ambiguous. Consequently, query understanding often uses query rewriting to disambiguate user-input queries. While using e-commerce search tools, users tend to enter multiple searches, which we call context, before purchasing. These history searches contain contextual insights about users' true shopping intents. Therefore, modeling such contextual information is critical to a better query rewriting model. However, existing query rewriting models ignore users' history behaviors and consider only the instant search query, which is often a short string offering limited information about the true shopping intent. We propose an end-to-end context-aware query rewriting model to bridge this gap, which takes the search context into account. Specifically, our model builds a session graph using the history search queries and their contained words. We then employ a graph attention mechanism that models cross-query relations and computes contextual information of the session. The model subsequently calculates session representations by combining the contextual information with the instant search query using an aggregation network. The session representations are then decoded to generate rewritten queries. Empirically, we demonstrate the superiority of our method to state-of-the-art approaches under various metrics. On in-house data from an online shopping platform, by introducing contextual information, our model achieves 11.6% improvement under the MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank) metric and 20.1% improvement under the HIT@16 metric (a hit rate metric), in comparison with the best baseline method (Transformer-based model).

For as long as Apple has offered Siri, the digital assistant has defaulted to a female voice in North America. With the latest iOS 14.5 beta, TechCrunch reports Apple is introducing two English-speaking voices for Siri and making it so that you can pick the voice you like best when setting up an iOS or HomePod device. "We're excited to introduce two new Siri voices for English speakers and the option for Siri users to select the voice they want when they set up their device," Apple told the publication. "This is a continuation of Apple's long-standing commitment to diversity and inclusion, and products and services that are designed to better reflect the diversity of the world we live in." Apple recruited new talent for the two voices and then ran them through its Neural text to speech engine.

Recommendation systems have lately been popularized globally, with primary use cases in online interaction systems, with significant focus on e-commerce platforms. We have developed a machine learning-based recommendation platform, which can be easily applied to almost any items and/or actions domain. Contrary to existing recommendation systems, our platform supports multiple types of interaction data with multiple modalities of metadata natively. This is achieved through multi-modal fusion of various data representations. We deployed the platform into multiple e-commerce stores of different kinds, e.g. food and beverages, shoes, fashion items, telecom operators. Here, we present our system, its flexibility and performance. We also show benchmark results on open datasets, that significantly outperform state-of-the-art prior work.

The new iPhone SE has landed and it qualifies as about the best-value phone Apple has yet made. With a price of £419, it very nearly matches the lowest debut price for an iPhone, too. That was the original iPhone SE which launched in March 2016 for £359. This is the first time Apple has recycled a phone's name. The original SE (the two letters don't stand for anything, by the way) matched the chassis of the iPhone 5s with a much newer, more powerful processor – the chip from the iPhone 6s.

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK – Apple Inc. unveiled the new iPhone SE, its first low-cost smartphone in four years, seeking to boost sales while consumers wait for the launch of new high-end models with 5G later this year. The new iPhone SE with a 4.7-inch screen will hit the market on April 24 in countries such as Japan and the United States. Pre-order will be available beginning Friday with a price tag starting at 44,800 yen ($399). That is several hundred dollars cheaper than the flagship iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro lines. To get to the lower cost, Apple is using an iPhone 8 design that debuted in 2017 along with a less advanced camera system, a smaller and older display and a Touch ID fingerprint scanner instead of 3-D facial recognition.

Apple Inc. unveiled the new iPhone SE, its first low-cost smartphone in four years, seeking to boost sales while consumers wait for the launch of new high-end models with 5G later this year. To get to the lower cost, Apple is using an iPhone 8 design that debuted in 2017 along with a less advanced camera system, a smaller and older display and a Touch ID fingerprint scanner instead of 3-D facial recognition. The new model comes in black, white or red with storage options ranging from 64GB to 256GB, Cupertino, California-based Apple said on Wednesday. While many of the device's specifications have been surpassed by newer technology at this point, the iPhone SE does use the same A13 processor as the latest flagship iPhone. This also gives Apple a more competitive model in countries such as India that are flooded with cheaper Android phones.

Apple has launched a cheaper version of its iPhone SE as it attempts to continue normal business despite the coronavirus pandemic. The second-generation SE resembles Apple's previous design used for its smartphones between 2014 and 2017, complete with the traditional touch ID home button instead of face recognition. It costs from £419 in the UK and $399 in the US. The new phone is a follow-up to the entry-level SE from 2016, which reused the design of the iPhone 5S. The new SE replaces 2017's iPhone 8, which was until recently the cheapest iPhone on sale, costing £479 in the UK and $449 in the US. The second-generation SE has a 4.7in retina HD LCD screen, making it one of the few smaller smartphones available.