Of course, the promotional video was a lot more dramatic than what the company was actually demoing at the show itself. And while the company insisted to us that the dog in the video was, indeed real and not the result of a few clever film cuts, the poor confused pup was never actually at risk during its trials.

Qualcomm has announced the new Snapdragon 700 series platform that will soon power mid-range Android phones. The new series of mobile processors will be able to bring some of the features of the Snapdragon 800 series to more affordable handsets. For users of flagship Android phones, their devices are likely packing the Snapdragon 800 series, while mid-rangers are packing the Snapdragon 660. For entry level handsets, those are packing the Snapdragon 200 or the 400 series. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 700 is intended to bridge the gap between the mid-range and flagship phones.

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei has shown how an AI-powered smartphone can drive a car.As Ivor Bennett reports, the'RoadReader' project, on display at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, aims to demonstrate how existing mobile technology is capable of handling autonomous vehicles. A view of a driverless Porsche car controlled by Huawai's Mate 10 Pro handset that transforms a regular car into a self-driving vehicle. BARCELONA -- I'm a passenger in a Porsche Panamera riding on a short track set up outside Barcelona's soccer stadium. But what makes this particular driverless car demo unique is that it is being piloted by Huawei's Mate 10 Pro smartphone. The Chinese smartphone maker, the third largest in the world, insists it is not getting into the self-driving car business.

You'd think that's an easy rule to follow, but Huawei seems to have forgotten. In what may be the most excruciating promotional stunt we've ever seen from a technology company in many years, Huawei based a promo for its AI on a satire of AI. Huawei claims to have set out to train a phone app that would tell a cat from a dog, then test its accuracy by driving a car at a dog. The app was a success – and the dog lived. There are one just one or two things wrong with this picture.

You'd think that's an easy rule to follow, but Huawei seems to have forgotten. In what may be the most excruciating promotional stunt we've ever seen from a technology company in many years, Huawei based a promo for its AI on a satire of AI. Huawei claims to have set out to train a phone app that would tell a cat from a dog, then test its accuracy by driving a car at a dog. The app was a success – and the dog lived. There are one just one or two things wrong with this picture.

T-Mobile is accelerating automation of its customer service operations by deploying Tupl's Automated Customer Care Resolution (ACCR) tool, which utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to speed response time on customers' help tickets. ACCR is one of several AI troubleshooting tools Tupl developed under the TuplOS platform; the ACCR tool expedites customer service cases by providing customer care representatives with detailed cause reports and technical resolutions. According to the announcement, the ACCR tool is "100 times faster and up to 4 times more accurate than legacy resolution methodologies, providing automation levels around 90%." (See Tupl Deploys AI Technology With T-Mobile US.) "Tupl's tool has enabled us to respond to our customers much faster on technical issues," says Brian King, T-Mobile's SVP of technology service delivery and operations, in the release. Tupl Founder and CTO Pablo Tapia says that in legacy systems a series of customer service reps, engineers and technicians may use over six different systems to identify the source of a customer issue once a ticket is opened. Tupl conducted several trials to measure ACCR's performance and determined the tool cuts ticket processing time down from several hours to less than an hour.

Neural Network Accelerators (NNA) may have become a must-have block in high-end mobile processors. Huawei Kirin 970, Samsung Exynos 9810, and Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 (via its Hexagon DSP) processors all come with NNA or NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to speed up tasks and comsume less power for tasks related to artificial intelligence / machine learning. Mediatek has also jumped on the bandwagon with Helio P60 chipset featuring four Cortex A73 cores, four Cortex A53 cores, an Arm Mali-G72MP3 GPU and a multi-core mobile APU (AI Processing Unit) leveraging the company's NeuroPilot AI technology. Helio P60 is said to deliver 70% higher performance, 25% power savings in heavy duty games, and overall power savings of up to 12% compared to the previous generation MediaTek Helio P23 series chipset. The APU offers double the power efficiency of the GPU for AI processing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) was one of 2017's biggest technology buzzwords and it continues to be talked about by companies this year. Telecom firms will be discussing how AI is being used to enhance their networks, while mobile players will be talking about how the technology is being used in their devices. For example, last year Huawei launched the Mate 10 Pro, a smartphone with its own Kirin 970 AI chip. But analysts warned that many companies will be marketing their products as AI, without actually using any of the technology. For example, a company might claim that a feature is powered by AI when in reality its software is based on a rigid computer algorithm. "We believe that AI is going to be a fundamental element of all devices and services in the future, the way in which it is being marketed right now feels reckless," Wood said.

At the end of the month, Barcelona will traditionally host the annual Mobile World Congress and Doogee plans to introduce three new ("futuristic" as they say) smartphones during the show. The first one is the Dogee V, which has a full-screen front design with an in-display fingerprint sensor and an AMOLED display with a U-shaped notch. The second is Doogee Mix 3, which will have a side-mounted fingerprint sensor and... Doogee V is known for featuring an in-display fingerprint sensor, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of RAM and almost an all-screen front. The new unnamed smartphone resembles the V in many ways - it has the same U-shaped notch, 3D curved back, but instead of having an in-display fingerprint sensor, it has a thin chin... While Doogee BL12000's hot pre-sale is currently going on, the DoogeeSlide Full-screen Concept Phone appears on a third-party video.

Huawei has really upped its game in recent years, especially with the launch of its Huawei Mate 10 Series late last year. Its sleek build aside, its specifications are pretty outstanding. In fact, it boasts Kirin 970 – which Huawei designed and built itself – the world's first AI processor for smartphones with a dedicated Neural-Network Processing Unit (NPU). This chipset pretty much fuels the smartphone's machine-learning features and includes a special module dedicated to AI calculations. AI is becoming increasingly important in today's smartphone experience, and coupled with machine learning, they are the reasons why our phones are getting better and more powerful every year.