Chrissy Kinsella was looking for a more personalized approach to her health. "You know, what is good for you as an individual may not necessarily be good for the next person," she says. So she reached for a subscription to Zoe--a personalized nutrition service cofounded by Tim Spector, a celebrity scientist and a genetic epidemiologist at King's College London. Kinsella paid the £299 ($365) for a testing kit and later received a bright yellow package in the mail: a bundle of vials, patches, and muffins. By testing, scoring, and monitoring how you respond to different foods, Zoe says, it can help with a whole host of problems.

One Concern, a resilience-as-a-service solutions provider with a focus on providing upfront information on potential financial impacts of climate related loss events, has appointed former RMS employee Tim Kinsella as its Executive Director, Sales – P&C Insurance. One Concern offers climate related analytic services with a unique approach of using artificial intelligence to try and understand, estimate, and forecast, the potential implications and losses from climate and weather catastrophes. Earlier this year, the company launched its first full digital twin, alongside a data service to help companies understand the implications of events, which we explained at the time has ramifications and provides a glimpse of the future that can help in designing risk transfer and insurance-linked securities (ILS) products. Now, in a sign of One Concern's increasing focus on the insurance and reinsurance sector and how its products can both help carriers understand risks in their portfolios, as well as develop new risk transfer products such as using parametric triggers, the hiring of Kinsella signals an increasing push to gain insurance and reinsurance industry clients. Kinsella was a Senior Client Director at catastrophe risk modeller RMS for almost four years, having joined the firm at the beginning of 2019.

For the past several years, two of the hottest products during the holidays have been low-cost streaming devices from Amazon and Roku, often discounted down to around $25 for end of the year sales. And often left out of the party was Google, which first launched its own unit in 2013, Chromecast, initially selling for $35, a product aimed at early adopters and serious tech nerds. Which is why Google's announcement Wednesday of a new $49.99 Chromecast (available by Oct. 15) was hands down the most interesting of its presentation, and the one most likely to end up in more consumers homes. Also announced were two new smartphones ($499 and $699) and a redesigned Google Home smart speaker with better sound, selling for $99. Help:Blur your home on Maps and erase your data to remove your life from Google's grip With the new Chromecast, Google can now compete in streaming effectively on the same playing field as Amazon and Roku, which each tout having 40 million customers each for their streaming services.

A reminder to those who are working at home: You might want to turn your Amazon or Google smart home speaker them off, or at the very least, mute the microphone. What most people forget is that Alexa and the Google Assistant are always listening. Sure, they only come to life after you utter "Alexa" or "Hey, Google," but what happens when you slip those words in the middle of sentences? Amazon and Google record every interaction, even if you don't ask a specific question, and the recordings are stored on Amazon and Google servers. Sometimes the speakers are awakened with words that they mistake for the wake words.

Not all voice assistants can handle the same requests. We put Siri, Alexa and Google to the test. LOS ANGELES – When you pose the simplest of questions to Siri and it can't answer "what's 1% of $1 million," yet Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant can, you know just how far behind Apple's assistant has fallen to rivals. Siri was the first voice assistant, announced in 2011 for the iPhone 4S, but over the past several years, Amazon and Google have rolled over it, by investing heavily and introducing many new features, while Siri "hasn't moved forward much," says Bret Kinsella, who runs the Voicebot.ai Apple traditionally takes center stage at its Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) to unveil new software features to whet app makers' appetites, and often they involve Siri.

Jefferson Graham takes a look at two products that bring Alexa and voice-activated controls to the auto, Garmin Speak and Roav Viv. LOS ANGELES -- "Alexa, what music should I listen to?" It's an interesting question that follows up with Amazon's Alexa asking follow-ups, one of the few times the personal assistant gets really conversational and makes suggestions. Alexa, via Amazon Music, gave me options: the late, legendary gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt or singers Adele or James Taylor. I went for Django, and with that, my personal DJ robot had followed through successfully, finding three artists I love. Such it is with music commands for personal assistants.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. LAS VEGAS – The Google team is seemingly everywhere at CES 2019, both in signage at the main convention center, ("Hey Google"), a large booth presence and hundreds of people dressed in white "Hey Google" jumpsuits, topped off with matching "Hey Google" beanies. Arch-rival Amazon, on the other hand, has a small, understated ballroom at the lower trafficked Sands Convention Expo, showcasing a potpourri of products, from Amazon and other vendors, that use the Alexa voice commands. Staffers are adorned in blue Alexa sports shirts. On the eve of the show, the companies threw down the gauntlet: Amazon Echo speakers and third-party vendors using the system have sold over 100 million units, Amazon said.

All three a virtual tie, but each had questions they couldn't answer. Tune in to find out where Apple, Google and Amazon fell down. LOS ANGELES -- Apple this week had every opportunity to show off new voice skills for Siri, the personal digital assistant, and to prove that it could be competitive with Amazon and Google. Instead, it pretty much took a pass. At its annual developers conference Monday, the company spent 15 minutes on new augmented reality updates, nearly a half-hour on updates to a fall macOS software update and over an hour on the new version of iOS12, the mobile operating system upgrade for the iPhone and iPad that will be out in the fall.

Google Duplex will call salons, restaurants, and pretend to be your personal human. Google has its robot work cut out for it. Janell Goplen automatically hangs up the phone when she receives automated calls to her Clearwater restaurant in Newport, Oregon. In the summer, Google will begin testing its controversial new plan to have the Google Assistant smartphone app make human-sounding calls for restaurant reservations and hair-cut appointments. If Goplen were to get the call and she sensed that it was robotic, "I'd hang up," she says.

With 2018 almost here, vendors are wondering where and in what technologies budgets will be spent in the coming months. What once were cutting edge technologies only two years ago are now reaching the mainstream. We turned to a number of executives to find out what technologies they thought would shape the coming 12 months. Unsurprisingly, while they named many different types of technologies, one common denominator connected them all -- artificial intelligence (AI). According to Moritz Zimmermann, CTO of SAP Hybris, 2017 was the year companies tapped AI and machine learning to transform the customer experience, making stories from sci-fi a reality through the presence of robots in stores and the use of virtual reality that allowed shoppers to test drive cars, design houses and more.