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Want a smarter Alexa, savvier Siri, brainier Google Now or a cleverer Cortana? So do Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft -- and each is working to make its voice assistant your personal Einstein of choice. Amazon recently enhanced its efforts by nabbing an AI expert from eBay, The Wall Street Joual reported Friday. Hassan Sawaf is now Amazon's director of artificial intelligence, focusing on "the user experience for users of Amazon's search capability across all products and businesses," according to Sawaf's LinkedIn page. The Joual was one of the first to spot Sawaf's updated responsibilities on LinkedIn. "eBay has wide and deep capabilities in AI across the technology organization, and ...

Apple Music and Tidal have leaned on exclusives as the battle to catch up to Spotify's lead in subscribers. Taylor Martin/CNET The rivalry between the subscription music giants may be tuing bitter. Spotify has been penalizing some artists who provide music exclusively to its main competitor, Apple Music, according to a Bloomberg report. Citing uamed people familiar with the practices, the report said Spotify search results bury tunes by artists who give their material to Apple Music first. The company also waed acts it will exclude Apple-exclusive music from featured Spotify playlists once it's available to ...

In mid-June, Dave Jackson bought a Frito-Lay variety pack through AmazonFresh for $10.44. When he retued to the Amazon mobile app soon after, it coaxed him to purchase more of the snacks through its "Buy It Again" feature. But the very same variety pack under the "Buy It Again" baer didn't cost $10.44. It was $22.94. The same thing happened after buying Snickers bars for 89 cents apiece on AmazonFresh, Amazon's grocery delivery service. Yet again, Amazon invited him to buy more, but for $4.95 each, more than five times the previous price. What was happening? Jackson, a web administrator in San Jose, Califoia, believes he found a handful of bugs on Amazon after it recently combined the ...

RoadshowNewsCar IndustryAmazon offers up car advice with Amazon VehiclesEnlarge ImageA screenshot of an Amazon Vehicles detail page. Amazon Amazon is gearing up its car knowledge.No, the e-commerce juggeaut still isn't selling cars -- not yet, anyway. Instead, the company on Thursday launched a new webpage called Amazon Vehicles that helps customers research new and classic cars.Amazon Vehicles could help solidify Amazon's place as the search engine for shopping. Bypassing Google's own Google Shopping search engine could train consumers to start thinking about a purchase at Amazon first, even in the rare case...

RoadshowNewsCar IndustrySchedule a test drive where you want with Hyundai and Amazon Close AutoComplete: Massachusetts will tax ridesharing and give that money to taxi companies Drag "Bring it to the mountains, please. I have some, uh, steering tests I'd like to perform." Jos...

[embedded content] Even if you might be suffering from Pokemon Go overload, this video of a musician playing the Pokemon theme song on flaming bagpipes while dressed as the Pokemon creature Charmander is very impressive. Considering the Charmander has a tail that can produce fire, it makes sense that the bagpipes used to play the Pokemon theme also ignite with flames.The talented musician who made this tribute possible is Brian Kidd -- best known as The Unipiper -- from Portland, Oregon. This isn't the first time The Unipiper has paid homage to something geeky. Earlier in the year, he dressed up as Superman and taunted Batman by playing his bagpi...

"Endless" is exclusively streaming on Apple Music. Screenshot/Xiomara Blanco The wait for a new Frank Ocean album is over -- kind of.Early Friday moing the artist released a visual album, "Endless," exclusively on Apple Music. Currently, it's only available to stream as a 45-minute long video, not as a typical audio-only album with individual tracks.The project was heavily teased, thanks to a mysterious live stream that unceremoniously debuted two weeks ago. It answers a few questions curious fans have patiently waited for (he really was building some type of staircase), but, it doesn't quite answer the most ...

Enlarge ImageThe Ecobee3 Smart Thermostat and the Amazon Echo smart speaker. Ecobee Last year, Amazon established the $100 million dollar "Alexa Fund" for developers and manufacturers both large and small. The idea was fairly straightforward -- support people with good ideas on how to put the voice-recognition technology in the Amazon Echo smart speaker to good use. Now, the online mega-retailer is ponying up for its biggest investment yet and joining in on a$35 million-dollar funding round for the makers of the Ecobee smart thermostat. The funding round brings Amazon in with Thomvest and Relay Ventures, an...

Jet.com has landed at Walmart. Jet.com Walmart is hoping its acquisition of startup Jet.com takes its own online presence to new heights. The retail giant said Monday it has acquired Jet.com in a stock and cash deal worth $3 billion. The deal underscores the competitive nature of the online retail business, where Amazon dominates and Walmart, the largest brick-and-mortar retail in the US, plays second fiddle. Walmart is apparently expecting that Jet.com, which saw early hype as a possible "Amazon-killer," can even the playing field. "Walmart.com will grow faster, the seamless shopping experience we're pursuin...

Will Release Radar be as successful as the popular Discover Weekly playlist? Spotify Spotify's hit a certain groove with its algorithm-driven playlists like Discover Weekly. The music streaming service regularly unearths songs and artists listeners might have missed.Now, Spotify is applying that same idea to new releases with a feature called Release Radar, the company said in a blog post Friday. Release Radar, available today, is a personalized playlist that updates every Friday with 1-2 hours of tracks from new releases, culled from the past few weeks. Spotify says the more you listen, the better the playli...

Thanks a lot, Steven Spielberg and John Williams, for forever creeping us out about sharks. Spielberg's 1975 movie "Jaws" wouldn't have been quite as terrifying without Williams' "duun dun" music, and we all know it. Now a study published Wednesday in the joual PLOS One has quantified our quivering. Researchers from UC San Diego and Harvard showed 2,100 people a shark clip from the BBC's "Blue Planet" documentary series and either set it to ominous or uplifting music or let it run silently. "Participants who viewed a video clip set to ominous music rated sharks more negatively and less positively than those who watched the same clip set to uplifting music or to silence," the researchers ...

Target and Amazon, together again. Target Four years ago, Target threw Amazon's gadgets out of its stores amid heightened competition between the retailers.Now, the big-box chain has reversed course, bringing back Amazon's Fire tablets, Fire TV devices and Kindle e-readers to its website, with plans to sell the gadgets in stores by October, according to a report from Bloomberg. The Amazon Echo smart speaker, though, doesn't appear on Target.com."Target continually evaluates our assortment to deliver quality products at a great value," a Target spokesperson said in a statement Thursday. "We know our guests lov...

There are plenty of things in my house that I yell at. Some of them answer back these days, though, and even do what I ask. My dog is still a work in progress as far as that goes, but my Amazon Echo has just about nailed it. The Echo is a device that uses speech recognition to perform an ever-growing range of tasks on command. Amazon calls the built-in brains of this device "Alexa," and she* is the thing that makes it work.Alexa is a smart cookie: if I say "Alexa, play some Pink Floyd", she will find some Floyd and start playing it over the built-in speaker of the Echo. If I say "Alexa, what's the weather?" she will calmly tell me that it is too damn hot in Boston. How does she do this? The ...

There are plenty of things in my house that I yell at. Some of them answer back these days, though, and even do what I ask. My dog is still a work in progress as far as that goes, but my Amazon Echo has just about nailed it. The Echo is a device that uses speech recognition to perform an ever-growing range of tasks on command. Amazon calls the built-in brains of this device "Alexa," and she* is the thing that makes it work.Alexa is a smart cookie: if I say "Alexa, play some Pink Floyd", she will find some Floyd and start playing it over the built-in speaker of the Echo. If I say "Alexa, what's the weather?" she will calmly tell me that it is too damn hot in Boston. How does she do this? The ...

Enlarge Image Britney Spears/Twitter Spotify has suffered another blow in the ongoing online music-streaming battle: Britney Spears' "Glory", her first album since 2013, will be an Apple Music exclusive.The news was aounced by Spears herself, who said on Twitter that the album would be dropping on August 26.Both Apple Music and Tidal have managed to snag their own share of exclusives this year, but the same can't be said for Spotify. Frank Ocean's "Boys Don't Cry" will be an Apple Music exclusive upon its release this Friday, and Drake's "Views" was exclusive to the service for a week back in April. It'll rem...

Enlarge ImageYou can soon expect to see new, interactive gaming experiences developed for Amazon's Alexa-powered smart speakers. Tyler Lizenby/CNET Amazon wants more gaming options for its voice-powered virtual assistant Alexa, and today, it's introducing a new set of tools that'll make it easier for developers to bring them to life. The gaming tools are the newest addition to the Alexa Skills Kit, a set of blueprints for creating Alexa's "skills" -- essentially the apps of the Amazon Echo and Amazon's other Alexa-enabled gadgets. Developers already had access to templates for crafting basic command-and...

Videos by Coldplay, fronted by Chris Martin, are among the first that Vevo will add from its agreement with Waer Music. Tabatha Fireman/Getty Images Online music-video company Vevo said Tuesday is has sealed a license with the last of the three major labels, Waer Music Group, to add selections of Waer's official videos into the Vevo library. It already has videos from the two other majors, Universal Music and Sony Music Entertainment, which together own Vevo. (YouTube's parent Google and outside investor Abu Dhabi Media also hold stakes.)For Vevo, Waer Music checks off a big box as it prepares to launch a sub...

If Spotify is too expensive and your tastes don't get much more adventurous than Coldplay, Amazon Music wants to be the music-streaming service for you. It might not have as many songs as rivals, but Amazon says you don't need them when you have the rest of Amazon Prime at your fingertips.Launched in the US in 2014 and the UK in 2015, Amazon Music is the retail giant's streaming service that comes bundled with Amazon Prime. One year on from the British launch we caught up with Paul Firth, head of Amazon Music UK, to blow out the candles and find out how being part of the Amazon empire makes Amazon Music different from Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services.Amazon Music is a "main...

Amazon might be coming out with a noise-canceling headphone that automatically tus off when someone yells your name.USPTO.govHere in New York City, noise-canceling headphones are as important as comfortable walking shoes. I throw a set in my bag every moing to fight the sound of shrilly subway trains, noisy construction crews and that saxophone busker guy who always manages to find my subway car.Muting the world might sound like bliss, but to walk around a busy city with only four senses in use is a dangerous game. They might be aoying, but some noises you actually need to hear, like a car ho or a siren.Granted, some headphones like the Master & Dynamic MH40s have a manual pass-through b...

Amazon Prime has an estimated 60 million members in the US, reaches 11 countries and even has its own fake holiday. For CEO Jeff Bezos, that's not nearly enough.The world's largest e-commerce company has been busy finding new ways to evolve and expand the $99-a-year Prime loyalty program. This week, Prime launched in India, the second most-populous country in the world, and arrived in Belgium in February. Prime Video can now be purchased as a standalone service in the US, making it a more direct competitor to Netflix, and Prime can be bought on a monthly -- instead of just aual -- basis, making it more affordable for more people.There now are rumors Prime Music will also become a standalone ...