There are industry gatherings for all sectors, and that includes the funeral sector. It's not an area where you'd expect to find many tech products, but at the Tokyo International Funeral & Cemetery Show 2017 this week, all eyes were on the latest breakthrough in Buddhist priests. That's very expensive, so plastic molding company Nissei Eco Co. had an idea: create a robotic Buddhist priest and undercut the real thing on price. And rather than starting from scratch, Nissei instead modified an existing robot in the form of SoftBank's Pepper robot. As Hannah Gould, a researcher at the Japan Foundation, points out in the video above, Japan and technology have been evolving at the same time so a robot priest won't seem too weird. All Nissei had to do to modify the Pepper robot was write some software allowing it to tap the drums while it chanted.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by an unending stream of information? It can seem like a barrage of new email and text messages demands constant attention, and there are also phone calls to pick up, articles to read, and knocks on the door to answer. Putting these pieces together to keep track of what is important can be a real challenge. The same information overload is a concern in many computational settings. Telecommunications companies, for example, want to keep track of the activity on their networks, to identify overall network health and spot anomalies or changes in behavior. Yet, the scale of events occurring is huge: many millions of network events per hour, per network element. While new technologies allow the scale and granularity of events being monitored to increase by orders of magnitude, the capacity of computing elements (processors, memory, and disks) to make sense of these is barely increasing. Even on a small scale, the amount of information may be too large to store in an impoverished setting (say, an embedded device) or to keep conveniently in fast storage. In response to this challenge, the model of streaming data processing has grown in popularity. The aim is no longer to capture, store, and index every minute event, but rather to process each observation quickly in order to create a summary of the current state. Following its processing, an event is dropped and is no longer accessible. The summary that is retained is often referred to as a sketch of the data. Coping with the vast scale of information means making compromises: The description of the world is approximate rather than exact; the nature of queries to be answered must be decided in advance rather than after the fact; and some questions are now insoluble. The ability to process vast quantities of data at blinding speeds with modest resources, however, can more than make up for these limitations.

In Japan robots can serve as companions, helpers for the elderly, entertainment bots and even sexual partners, but now SoftBank's humanoid robot Pepper has put itself up for hire as a Buddhist priest for funerals. Taking the German blessing bot's idea and running with it, Pepper's new code will let it chant sutras in a computerised voice while tapping a drum, providing a cheaper alternative to a human priest to see your loved ones off into the eternal sleep. The robot was on display on Wednesday at a funeral industry fair, the Life Ending Industry Expo, in Tokyo, shown off by plastic molding maker Nissei Eco. With the average cost of a funeral in Japan reaching in excess of £20,000, according to data from Japan's Consumer Association in 2008, and human priests costing £1,700, Nissei Eco is looking to undercut the market with Pepper available for just £350 per funeral. With Japan's population ageing and shrinking, many Buddhist priests receive less financial support from their communities, prompting some to find part-time work outside their temple duties, said Michio Inamura, Nissei's executive adviser, who suggested Pepper could step in when a human wasn't available.

A "robot priest" adorned with Buddhist robes and a hi-resolution tablet is now programmed to perform funeral rites for less cost than a human. Japanese plastic molding maker Nissei Eco Co. created software for Pepper The Robot enabling the humanoid to chant Buddhist mantras and recite sutras typically performed by monks at funerals. First introduced in 2014 by Japanese telecommunications company, SoftBank Group Corp., Pepper is a human-shaped robot that welcomes customers to more than 140 SoftBank Mobile stores. The robot boasts several cameras and microphones in addition to its sophisticated AI ability to perceive and respond to human emotions. Michio Inamura, a Nissei executive adviser, tells Reuters that Japan's aging and declining population has led to Buddhist priests receiving less financial backing in communities and working outside of their temple duties to make ends meet.

Artificial intelligence is about more than just a voice assistant on your phone, and Huawei's promising its own AI will do a lot more. Huawei has big plans for artificial intelligence, something it has made very clear several times over the past year, and on September 2 it's going to reveal the first product built around its AI technology. In a series of teasers posted to its social media channels, it notes the date and tells us to, "expect the unexpected." Does this mean Huawei's own voice assistant is here, ready to challenge Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Samsung's Bixby? Possibly, but Huawei has also hinted any assistant duties will be just a small part of what its AI is capable of. In a tweet from the end of July, Huawei asked what AI meant to us, and in an image said it should be, "more than just a voice assistant."

Qualcomm announced that it has purchased Dutch artificial intelligence research company Scyfer to boost its expertise in machine learning. The price was not disclosed. Scyfer has built artificial intelligence systems for companies in manufacturing, healthcare, finance and other industries. Founded in 2013, Scyfer is a spinoff of the University of Amsterdam. Professor Max Welling co-founded the company and will continue to work both as a professor and an artificial intelligence researcher for Qualcomm.

Last week, Qualcomm announced that it had acquired Netherlands-based machine learning startup Scyfer for an undisclosed amount. The company also laid out its vision for artificial intelligence, indicating that it would double down on a device-focused AI implementation. Below, we provide a quick run-down of what Qualcomm has been doing in the AI space and what Scyfer could bring to the table. Trefis has a $64 price estimate for Qualcomm, which is about 20% ahead of the current market price. While Qualcomm has been working on AI for about a decade, the company's more recent efforts have centered around deploying artificial intelligence technology at the device level – in smartphones and cars.

The iPhone 8 is expected to arrive next month with a facial recognition feature. Now, an alleged photo of the 3D sensing camera of the device has surfaced online, which is believed to be what makes this new feature possible. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported back in February that the 3D sensing front-facing camera on the iPhone 8 would be "revolutionary." He said at the time that the front-facing camera would have three modules: a standard front-facing camera module, an infrared transmitting module and an infrared receiving module. Just yesterday, Kuo reported that Apple's 3D sensing technology would be ahead of Qualcomm's own solution.

Smartphone manufacturer Azumi Mobile, being new to the U.S. market, wanted to provide a customer experience journey that outshined its competitors. To achieve that goal, the company implemented new artificial intelligence-driven self-service tech that better equipped customers to solve problems on their own. Azumi Mobile joined ranks with DeviceBits, a Columbus, Ohio-based company that merges artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to help businesses provide customer service through chatbots and interactive content that enables customers to help themselves. Last year, Apple introduced an iPhone and iPad support app to promote self-service, and the company also uses predictive analytics to improve OS functionality and the customer experience. DeviceBits, though, saw a unique opportunity that was being omitted in the area of customer service; specifically, the customer experience post-purchase, said CEO JC Ramey.

Neither love nor money could get reporters in to the Honor press conference at CES 2017 in Las Vegas January – unless they had preregistered. Keynote addresses at the world's biggest consumer electronics show routinely attract a full house, but in the country that gave the world Apple, the international press corps seemed fixated on the touted "epic" capabilities of the Honor Magic, the latest model in the budget smartphone brand by Chinese manufacturer Huawei. There are almost as many mobile phone subscribers in the world as there are people – 5 billion devices, for a population of 7.5 billion, according to the 2017 global edition of the GSMA's Mobile Economy report. But the fact that a new launch can elicit so much hype is evidence that we still can't get enough. Huawei's Honor Magic might be the first, but surely by no means the last, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled smartphone.