When Meghan Cruz says "Hey, Alexa," her Amazon smart speaker bursts to life, offering the kind of helpful response she now expects from her automated assistant. With a few words in her breezy West Coast accent, the lab technician in Vancouver gets Alexa to tell her the weather in Berlin (70 degrees), the world's most poisonous animal (a geography cone snail) and the square root of 128, which it offers to the ninth decimal place. But when Andrea Moncada, a college student and fellow Vancouver resident who was raised in Colombia, says the same in her light Spanish accent, Alexa offers only a virtual shrug. She asks it to add a few numbers, and Alexa says sorry. She tells Alexa to turn the music off; instead, the volume turns up.

SINGAPORE: Artificial intelligence: Two words that have been bandied about everywhere to seemingly give anything a shimmer of technological star dust. Choose the latest AI-enabled machine to better clean your clothes. There's an AI chatbot waiting to answer all your queries. Yet, the buzzword also throws up questions for many. Does artificial intelligence mean robots?

Donald Trump has responded to the EU's decision to charge Google with a record-breaking fine. "I told you so!" the president tweeted. "The European Union just slapped a Five Billion Dollar fine on one of our great companies, Google. They truly have taken advantage of the US, but not for long!" The post is just the latest mark of deteriorating relations between the EU and the US.

Summer is the ideal time to sit back (with a glass of lemonade in one hand and a burrito in the other in an air-conditioned room) and watch the best video game players in the world battle it out for millions in prize money. However, diving into this digital world can be daunting, since each game has its own schedule and unique set of rules. Here we offer a handy viewing guide for upcoming matches in five major esports titles: Overwatch, League of Legends, Fortnite, Arena of Valor and Call of Duty. It's nearly championship time for most of these games, so matches are primed to be extra exciting. Sit back, take a big ol' bite of that burrito, and watch some esports with us: This is the inaugural season of the Overwatch League and things are heating up just ahead of the grand finals at the end of the month.

"Companies want to build great teams by hiring the best talent. But the best people don't apply on job sites typically. So then how do you hire those people?" Founded in 2014 by Exotel co-founder Vijay Sharma, Sudheendra Chilappagari, Saiteja Veera, and Rishabh Kaul, the idea was simple- instead of the inbound approach to hiring which companies follow, Belong bet on outbound hiring to disrupt the hiring space. The predictive hiring startup aims to give companies the tools to help them reach out to the best people, making it a very personalized engagement.

Chinese ride-sharing giant Didi Chuxing will explore ways to export its artificial intelligence and strength in big data to become a global enterprise, President Jean Liu told the Nikkei Asian Review in an interview. The company, known for its ride-hailing platform, on Thursday announced a plan for its joint venture with Japanese tech giant SoftBank to bring taxi hailing services to Japan staring this autumn. That same time day, however, SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son referred to the Japanese government as "stupid" for restricting ride-sharing and other services. Still, Didi and SoftBank hope their partnership with Japanese taxi companies using Didi algorithms to match drivers with customers will improve vehicle occupancy rates. Drivers will not have to pay fees for the service.

Posted By C. M. Rubin on Jul 18, 2018 "We're working on two areas to improve confidentiality of cloud computing." Data and the intelligence that can be gained from it is seen as a solution to solving many of the world's largest challenges, but despite the great opportunities, there are also significant risks. Data-based companies use data to make money. As computer systems become increasingly centralized and ubiquitous, the possibility for widespread security breaches becomes a risk, and we've already seen the devastating consequences, e.g. the Cambridge Analytica Scandal. Jon Crowcroft, the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems at the Alan Turing Institute – University of Cambridge, has researched these issues throughout his career in computer science.

Samsung is set to become the latest technology giant to vie for a place in your living room with a voice-enabled smart speaker, following similar efforts from Amazon, Apple and Google. The smart speaker is anticipated to cost around $300, making it considerably more expensive than the Amazon Echo and Google Home devices, but still cheaper than Apple's $349 HomePod. To justify this price, it will market the speaker as a high-end music player with innovative features like sound shifting, whereby the direction of the audio will be beamed at the person speaking to the device. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

SoftBank Corp. announced on Thursday that it will launch trial services for its taxi-hailing platform this fall by teaming up with Chinese mobility tech giant DiDi Chuxing. SoftBank and DiDi set up a joint venture last month called DiDi Mobility Japan to run the platform, which the firms say will improve the efficiency and quality of cab services and eventually help the industry grow. Japan already has several similar ride-hailing services, but the entry of DiDi -- whose 550 million clients make it one of the largest in the world along with SoftBank -- will raise the bar on the competition. "We believe this joint venture will add tremendous value to the taxi community in Japan, leveraging the technology abilities of DiDi as well as SoftBank's strong presence and strong customer base in Japan," said Stephen Zhu, head of DiDi Mobility Japan. The two firms said Japan's taxi industry faces a number of issues, including aging drivers and a cabbie shortage, as well as growing demand caused by a tourism boom.

Sony Corp. started accepting advance orders Thursday in Japan for its new artificial intelligence-equipped Aibo robot dog, making it possible for every would-be buyer to own the electric pet amid greater-than-expected demand. In January when Sony released an upgraded version of AIBO -- its predecessor debuted in 1999 and was discontinued in 2006 -- sales of the new model were limited by production capacity and consumers could only obtain one on a first-come-first-served basis or by lottery. Shortly after a Sony store opened Thursday in Tokyo's Ginza shopping district, there were about 10 people lined up for the canine robot. "I feel unsure if I can take care of a real dog any more at this age," explained Yoichi Iijima, 70, on why he decided to buy one. "I'm looking forward to having a new companion to talk with."