In the first quarter of 2017, Amazon owned almost 80% of the smart speaker market, while Google sipped up just 19.3%. But in the same quarter this year, Google sold more than a third of all smart speakers, while Amazon's share plummeted to 27.7%. And it's in the fastest-growing consumer technology market: nine million devices sold in Q1 2018 versus 2.9 million last year. "Google took the top spot, beating Amazon for the first time, shipping 3.2 million of its Google Home and Home Mini devices, against the 2.5 million Echo devices shipped by Amazon," says Canalys in a new report. Dipping market share is not unusual when a market matures. The initial innovator is confronted with competition on all sides -- Google, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Apple all have smart speaker solutions, and more are popping up daily.

Modern motion-capture systems are the product of a century of tinkering, innovation and computational advances. Mocap was born a lifetime before Gollum hit the big screen in The Lord of the Rings, and ages before the Cold War, Vietnam War or World War II. It was 1915, in the midst of the First World War, when animator Max Fleischer developed a technique called rotoscoping and laid the foundation for today's cutting-edge mocap technology. Rotoscoping was a primitive and time-consuming process, but it was a necessary starting point for the industry. In the rotoscope method, animators stood at a glass-topped desk and traced over a projected live-action film frame-by-frame, copying actors' or animals' actions directly onto a hand-drawn world.

The Research report presents a complete assessment of the market and contains Future trend, Current Growth Factors, attentive opinions, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry validated market data. The study is segmented by products type, application/end-users. The research study provides estimates for Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Agriculture Forecast till 2023. If you are involved in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Agriculture industry or intend to be, then this study will provide you comprehensive outlook. It's vital you keep your market knowledge up to date segmented by Applications Precision Farming, Drone Analytics, Agriculture Robots, Livestock Monitoring & Other, Product Types such as [Machine Learning, Computer Vision & Predictive Analytics] and some major players in the industry.

News Blog China's Perfect Storm AI Moment May 22, 2018 Robin Raskin, Founder, Living in Digital Times In July of 2017 the Chinese government issued a development plan to make the country the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. So far things are going better than pretty well. The government's commitment to AI dominance, the sheer amount of data that a country as large as China can feed to its AI learning systems, a mobile-dominated infrastructure, and an edge on chip manufacturing for AI-intensive activities like facial and image recognition contribute to China's AI success story. Deep machine learning, the ability for machines to ingest data, learn from it and then make predictions from it requires lots of data. "There are 160 cities in China with over 1 million people; there are 10 in the U.S., says Deborah Weinswig, Senior Analyst for Fung.

When Devaki Raj, the founder of the Mountain View-based deep learning startup CrowdAI, and Inc. 30 under 30 alum, learned that an artificial intelligence engineer she was trying to recruit was in the hospital, she didn't think twice about what she did next: Raj showed up at the hospital with flowers and balloons. She wanted to make sure the candidate got the message that her startup would be a very different atmosphere than what he'd get at a larger company. There's a talent war brewing between startups and big companies as both scramble to find top-notch artificial intelligence experts in a relatively small labor pool. "There's just not enough talent out there," Raj says. The number of experts in this field is not clear--Montreal startup Element A.I., which helps businesses build machine learning teams, estimates that there are some 20,000 PhD-level scientists around the world capable of building A.I. systems.

Hi Steemians, today I just want to share to you about "EKKBAZ", what is EKKBAZ? It is like being "Henry Sy" of your own. Base on their website it says "Powered by blockchain, artificial intelligence, social and collaborative technologies to significantly simplify direct to store interactions, reduce middlemen and empower root-level store owners in any corner of the earth. In short through ekkbaz we can now take advantage the B2B set up of business, overcoming some constraint in doing the traditional way of business. The goal of EKKBAZ will be developing BAZ Protocol, a decentralized and intelligent network with purpose-built components for FMCG businesses.

Technology company ABB India and Niti Aayog joined hands to boost the government's vision of'Make in India' through advanced manufacturing technologies that incorporate the latest developments in robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). A Statement of Intent (SoI) was signed on Wednesday for both to work together in preparing key sectors of the economy for digitalisation, artificial intelligence (AI) robotics, and industrial automation, an ABB India statement said. The initiative will cover the fast growing segment of electric mobility. Niti Aayog and ABB will work with government ministries, solicit feedback for areas critical to them and discuss solutions using industrial automation, and digitalisation technologies. "We are looking forward to learning more about practical applications of future technologies such as AI and IoT, especially in streamlining governance and economic systems. This collaboration, which will include cross-sectoral understanding of digitalization at ABB's world class centers, will be key in driving progress of key sectors in India. This collaboration is meant to lead to actionable insights and focused plans that will help India become a center for advanced manufacturing," said Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog.

Dell Technologies announces new 14th generation Dell EMC PowerEdge four-socket servers and Dell Precision Optimizer 5.0 to strengthen AI and ML capabilities. They have forged an alliance with Intel in AI and ML for Dell EMC Ready Solutions to enable customers to harness the power of data. New AI and ML solutions and partnerships drive smarter, better business outcomes by turning data into intelligent insights in real time. According to the recently released update of the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) 2018 IT Transformation Maturity Curve Index, commissioned by Dell EMC, transformed companies are 18X more likely to make better and faster data-driven decisions than their competition. Additionally, transformed companies are 22X as likely to be ahead of the competition with new products and services to market.

China has already taken a significant step into Germany. In the Rheinhausen district of Duisburg, trains are now rolling across the site where steelworkers once fought unsuccessfully to save their mill in 1987 while shipyard cranes stack up containers on the banks of the Rhine River. This is the precise point where the New Silk Road, China's massive infrastructure project, comes to an end. The site in Duisburg is known as Logport I and it is one of the largest container ports in Europe. Twenty-five trains arrive each week at Terminal DIT, also known as the China Terminal, after having traveled the more than 10,000 kilometers from Chongqing across Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland. Four years ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the inland port.

It's not by chance that Angela Merkel is devoting a whole day to the city of Shenzhen during her two-day visit to China. The southeastern Chinese metropolis is one of the most developed cities in the world -- it is modern, connected and astonishingly clean by China's standards thanks to an almost entirely e-mobile bus system. Like no other city, Shenzhen embodies the Chinese dream to become a technological global power. China wants to lead the world in key areas such as space travel, e-mobility and industrial robotics by 2025. That's the government's plan and it has already achieved its goal with regard to high-speed trains.