And today, it's PlayStation 5 launch day if you got your pre-orders in. Sony said supply is going to be tight for months, and there will be no launch fanfare at retail stores, either. The company is doing it for safety reasons because COVID-19 and the year that is 2020. This applies to all regions on the PS5's launch day, whether that's November 12th in the US or November 19th elsewhere. If you've suddenly decided the PS5 is the next-gen console for you, and you want it now, there are a few options if you're lucky (and fast).

Amazon's voice assistant in the U.S. can now predict "latent goals," or potential requests that a user doesn't explicitly ask. In the example above, when a user asks for the weather at Seaside Beach, Alexa responds with the weather, then asks if the user wants to set a live camera feed of Seaside Beach on the screen. Or, as described in a blog post, a user could say: "how long does it take to steep tea?" Alexa would answer with "five minutes is a good place to start," then follow with "Would you like me to set a timer for five minutes?" Amazon uses a "deep-learning-based trigger model" that analyzes the conversation and past interaction history, among other data, to help Alexa figure out appropriate times to ask these types of follow-up questions. Early data shows that latent-goal discovery is increasing customer engagement with certain Alexa skills, Amazon said.

Amazon today announced a new Alexa feature for U.S.-based English-language users that enables devices powered by the assistant to infer latent goals, or goals implicit in requests but not directly expressed. For instance, if a user says "How long does it take to steep tea?," Alexa might follow up with "Five minutes is a good place to start" and the question "Would you like me to set a timer for five minutes?" According to Amazon, dialog transitions like these require a number of AI algorithms under the hood. A machine learning-based trigger model decides whether to anticipate a latent goal by factoring in aspects of the context including text of a user's session and whether the user has engaged with Alexa's suggestions in the past. If the model finds the context suitable, the system suggests an Alexa app to address the latent goal. Those suggestions are based on relationships learned by the latent-goal discovery model, according to Amazon.

Conversations with your Amazon-brand digital assistant could soon be far less stilted. Following the introduction of the natural conversation feature in September, Amazon announced on Tuesday that Alexa can now infer a user's "latent goals" based on what the person is asking it. That is, if you ask your Alexa "Who's on Saturday Night Live tonight?" or "What time are the 49ers playing Sunday?" the system will not only tell you who is hosting and kickoff time but will also proactively offer to, say, set a reminder alarm or turn on the DVR to record. And while that process appears straightforward to the user, Amazon insists that the actual backend algorithms that drive the feature are quite complicated. The trigger that activates the system and offers a latent goal -- setting the reminder alarm or turning on the DVR -- is trained on a deep-learning model that takes into account several aspects of the conversation's context.