Alexa was due for an upgrade, and now it has gotten one. This week, Amazon held its annual media event where it debuted a slate of new hardware, software, and services. The company reserved the spot at center stage for Alexa, the voice assistant powering all of Amazon's smart home ambitions. Researchers at the company have given Alexa a technological upgrade that enables it to be more competitive in the ChatGPT era. Alexa can now speak more naturally, hold a conversation without as many awkward interactions, and even make its responses sound more emotionally nuanced.

The paper proposes a novel architecture for explainable AI based on semantic technologies and AI. We tailor the architecture for the domain of demand forecasting and validate it on a real-world case study. The provided explanations combine concepts describing features relevant to a particular forecast, related media events, and metadata regarding external datasets of interest. The knowledge graph provides concepts that convey feature information at a higher abstraction level. By using them, explanations do not expose sensitive details regarding the demand forecasting models. The explanations also emphasize actionable dimensions where suitable. We link domain knowledge, forecasted values, and forecast explanations in a Knowledge Graph. The ontology and dataset we developed for this use case are publicly available for further research.

Above: An illustration of how fingerprints are used to match audio. Every incoming audio request to Alexa that starts with a wake word is checked in two ways. It's first compared to a database of known fingerprinted instances of "Alexa," which also make use of the audio that follows the wake word. Then it's checked against a fraction of other requests coming into Alexa devices around the same time. Audio-matching requests from at least two other customers are identified as a "media event" and given increased scrutiny (and potentially declared a match). This contributes to a small cache of fingerprints, allowing Alexa to continue to ignore wake word requests even when they're not happening simultaneously. These fingerprinting methods -- for which Amazon has patents -- will together prevent as many as 80 to 90 percent of devices from responding to TV-originated Alexa statements, the company says.

A self-driving General Motors Co Bolt slowly drove more than two miles through crowded San Francisco streets in its media debut on Tuesday, but double-parked cars and orange traffic cones tripped up the computer driver, and a taco truck stumped the machine. GM's self-driving unit, Cruise Automation, gave reporters rides on Tuesday, the first public roadtrips for non-employees in its cars which have been tested in San Francisco, Phoenix and Detroit. Major automakers as well as technology leaders like Alphabet Inc and Intel Corp have poured billions into autonomous vehicle research, although fully self-driving cars are a work in progress. GM's self-driving unit, Cruise Automation, gave reporters rides on Tuesday, the first public roadtrips for non-employees in its cars which have been tested in San Francisco, Phoenix and Detroit Robo-taxi service is seen as the main use for most self-driving vehicles, including the Bolt. 'Our mission is to bring this technology to commercial deployment at scale, with safety, as soon as we humanly can do that,' GM President Dan Ammann told reporters.

As Apple prepares to open pre-orders on the iPhone X on October 27th, Tim Cook and his team will be hoping for a tidal wave of supporters to balance out the weaker reception of the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. But there are more issues around this handset than most, which makes the tenth-anniversary iPhone one of the riskiest launches for Apple in the last few years. If there's one thing more than anything else that powers Apple, it is the glowing press coverage the brand receives. Following the release of the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, reports of poor sales and a lack of enthusiasm for the Eights were hard to counter. Tim Cook had already taken steps in previous years to address the principle of releasing'overnight' or'weekend' sales figures of a product launch.

Once thought safe, DDR4 memory shown to be vulnerable to "Rowhammer" Physical weaknesses in memory chips that make computers and servers susceptible to hack attacks dubbed "Rowhammer" are more exploitable than previously thought and extend to DDR4 modules, not just DDR3, according to a recently published research paper. The paper, titled How Rowhammer Could Be Used to Exploit Weaknesses in Computer Hardware... Ars Technica How HTC and Valve built the Vive Long before the Vive was born, both software developer Valve and phone manufacturer HTC were separately looking into virtual reality. In 2012, VR was beginning to creep back into the public imagination. It started in May of that year, when id Software's John Carmack demoed a modified Oculus Rift running Doom 3. The following month, he took the Rift to a wider audience at the E3 games convention. By August, Palmer Luckey launched the Oculus Kickstarter campaign, and it broke records.