Amazon's Alexa service is rolling out on March 28, and with it supposedly comes a more personalized, intuitive, and powerful digital assistant thanks to its underlying generative AI technology. But for the new features to work, the company is asking a lot from its Echo and smart device users--whether or not they choose to use Alexa at all. Alexa is billed as a major upgrade that includes individual voice recognition through Alexa Voice ID, nuanced calendar scheduling, Ring home security system integrations, and product purchasing capabilities. It's Amazon's latest effort to generate a profit from Alexa, which lost 25 billion in revenue between 2007-2021 according to The Wall Street Journal last year. While Alexa will be added to all Prime subscriptions, users without Prime can enroll in the program for 19.99 per month.

But if you have an Amazon Echo, there's bad news for you - as Amazon is about to controversially kill a popular privacy feature. Until now, some Amazon Echo devices have had the option to process commands locally'on-device', keeping your voice within the confines of your home. But from March 28, all Alexa-powered Echo smart speakers will send your voice recordings to the cloud, whether you like it or not. Cory Doctorow, a blogger and expert on digital rights management, called it'absolutely unforgivable' because it will let Amazon workers snoop on all Echo recordings. Amazon has already received criticism for storing conversations users have with Alexa, which have been listened to and transcribed by staff, it admitted in 2019.

In addition to revealing its initial plans for AI and annual updates to iOS, macOS and more at WWDC 2024, Apple also discussed new capabilities coming to the second-gen AirPods Pro. Siri Interactions will allow you to respond to the assistant by nodding your head yes or shaking your head no. Apple also plans to introduce improved Voice Isolation that further reduces background noise when you're on a call. Both of these items are exclusive to the most recent AirPods Pro, because they rely on the company's H2 chip like existing Adaptive Audio, Personalized Volume and Conversation Awareness features. Like those advanced audio tools that are already available on AirPods Pro, Siri Interactions and Voice Isolation use the processing abilities of the H2 chip in tandem with the power of a source device -- an iPhone or MacBook Pro, for example.

Apple's big push into AI – which the company insists stands for "Apple Intelligence" – could spark an upgrade "supercycle", with the intense processing requirements for the souped-up Siri limiting it to only the most powerful iPhones currently on the market. The company risks angering users who will update to iOS 18 this autumn to discover that even a brand-new iPhone 15 is unable to run features such as automatic transcription, image generation and a smarter, more conversational voice assistant. Apple's new AI models will run on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, the only two devices the company has yet shipped with its A17 processor. Macs up to three years old will also be able to take advantage of the upgrade, provided they have a M1, 2 or 3 chip, and so too will iPad Pros with the same internal hardware. Critics have argued that the decision to not release a slower or less competent version of the AI system for older phones is motivated by profit.

On March 18, 2024, NVIDIA unveiled Project GR00T, a general-purpose multimodal generative AI model designed specifically for training humanoid robots. Preceding this event, Tesla's unveiling of the Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot on December 12, 2023, underscored the profound impact robotics is poised to have on reshaping various facets of our daily lives. While robots have long dominated industrial settings, their presence within our homes is a burgeoning phenomenon. This can be attributed, in part, to the complexities of domestic environments and the challenges of creating robots that can seamlessly integrate into our daily routines.

Technology companies are racing to develop artificial intelligence that can run "unplugged" from the internet, providing users with a more personalized and private experience. During this year's Intel Innovation summit, company CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled new "AI PCs" that will increase the use of AI on the devices themselves and not depend on the cloud, according to a report from Spectrum. The company is not alone in its quest to optimize its devices to run artificial intelligence "at the edge," unplugged from the internet and run on local hardware. Apple and Qualcomm have also been involved in the race, the report noted, leading a drive toward AI meant to act more as a personalized assistant for the end user. Most AI tools today rely heavily on data centers that require a stable internet connection, at times overburdening servers attempting to keep up with the growing demand.

Depending on the hardware you're using, training a large language model of any significant size can take weeks, months, even years to complete. That's no way to do business -- nobody has the electricity and time to be waiting that long. On Wednesday, NVIDIA unveiled the newest iteration of its Eos supercomputer, one powered by more than 10,000 H100 Tensor Core GPUs and capable of training a 175 billion-parameter GPT-3 model on 1 billion tokens in under four minutes. That's three times faster than the previous benchmark on the MLPerf AI industry standard, which NVIDIA set just six months ago. Eos represents an enormous amount of compute.

Amazon's fall hardware event was chock full of updates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the generative AI boom from the last year, the company began transforming Alexa into a much more versatile and conversational personal chatbot. But it also had plenty of new hardware to introduce, with new models of the Echo Show, security cameras, Echo Frames, a 10-gigabit router and more. Here's everything Amazon unveiled on Wednesday. As generative AI has exploded in popularity during the last year, task-focused personal assistants like Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa now seem even more dated than they did before.

During its annual fall event on Wednesday, Amazon unveiled a slate of devices and software updates to the Fire TV line. Brand new to the lineage is the Fire TV Soundbar. The soundbar is Bluetooth enabled and "simple to set up and compatible with all Fire TV streaming products and TVs," according to Daniel Rausch, Amazon's VP of Alexa and Fire TV, who was presenting on stage at the event. The soundbar is available starting today for $120. Rausch also announced a minor refresh of the ubiquitous Fire TV line of streaming sticks.

More than 10.7% of people aged 65 and older are affected by Alzheimer's disease. Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial as most Alzheimer's patients are unaware of having it until the effects become detrimental. AI has been known to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to diagnose Alzheimer's. However, models which produce low rates of false diagnoses are critical to prevent unnecessary treatments. Thus, we trained supervised Random Forest models with segmented brain volumes and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) outputs to classify different Alzheimer's stages. We then applied out-of-distribution (OOD) detection to the CNN model, enabling it to report OOD if misclassification is likely, thereby reducing false diagnoses. With an accuracy of 98% for detection and 95% for classification, our model based on CNN results outperformed our segmented volume model, which had detection and classification accuracies of 93% and 87%, respectively. Applying OOD detection to the CNN model enabled it to flag brain tumor images as OOD with 96% accuracy and minimal overall accuracy reduction. By using OOD detection to enhance the reliability of MRI classification using CNNs, we lowered the rate of false positives and eliminated a significant disadvantage of using Machine Learning models for healthcare tasks.