Smartphone makers are betting on camera features to help their flagship devices stand out. Samsung launched its first dual-cameras on the Note 8, Sony introduced super slow-mo video-recording on its XZ Premium and XZ1 series, while LG equipped the V30 with a glass lens that boasts a wide f/1.6 aperture. But Huawei has chosen a different route. In lieu of a new phone, the company showed off its Kirin 970 chip at IFA 2017, calling attention to the chipset's AI capabilities. The Kirin 970 will power Huawei's next flagship phone, the Mate 10, which is set to launch at a separate October event in Munich.

The robotics project is separate from the PIF's agreement last year to invest up to $45 billion over five years in the Softbank Vision Fund, a technology-focused private equity fund established with the Japanese company and other big investors.

Huawei is increasingly optimistic about the future of artificial intelligence. At CES Asia 2017, Chief Operating Officer Wan Biao spoke to Digital Trends about the technology's growth, describing three key stages in AI's evolution: "Enable me, Know me, Be me." We're already into the beginnings of the "know me" stage, Biao said. "Be me" is still some time away, but despite its potential, that may be a good thing. Machines are already surpassing human intelligence, Biao said, and we're edging even closer to the prospect of a smart society -- where people and machines are one. This, combined with previous statements made by Huawei about artificial intelligence and the integration of machine learning into its smartphones, gives us a tantalizing glimpse of the smart future.

Google Voice is great for a number of things, in particular differentiating between the contacts worthy of your regular number and those you aren't quite there with yet. But as has become apparent recently, it's not great at sending text messages, especially from Android Auto, Android Wear and Assistant. Fortunately, help could soon be on the way in the form of a new voice command. Multiple users have complained that Google Voice forgoes defaults to send text messages through their standard SMS app -- and subsequently, from their carrier number. For example, set your Google Voice number as the default SMS number in Hangouts, then set Hangouts as your default SMS app, and when you say "OK Google, send a text", it ignores everything and sends it as a regular message.

Telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies Co. looks set to join the increasingly competitive artificial intelligence sector, following in the footsteps of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. [NYSE:BABA] and tech juggernaut Tencent Holdings Ltd. [HKG:0700]. Huawei will team up with Nvidia Corp. [NASDAQ:NVDA], a world leader in visual computing, to build a public platform for artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. The telecoms giant is likely to unveil the details of the partnership at Huawei Connect 2017, which is being held in Shanghai from Sept. 5 through Sept. 7. Huawei positions the platform as one that will provide a revolutionary cloud experience by uniting with other industries and building a public cloud AI engine. China has a fairly large market which is home to a number of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, Ashok Pandey, vice president of Nvidia said about the firm's partnership with Alibaba Cloud, which began last year. Nvidia can't cover every corner of the market, but teaming up with Alibaba helps cover a greater audience, he added.

Huawei aims to use artificial intelligence-powered features such as instant image recognition to take on rivals Samsung and Apple when it launches its new flagship phone next month, a top executive said on Saturday. Richard Yu, chief executive of Huawei's consumer business, on Saturday revealed a powerful new mobile phone chip Huawei is betting on for its upcoming flagship Mate 10 and other high-end phones to deliver faster processing and lower power consumption. Huawei will launch the Mate 10 and its sister phone, the Mate 10 Pro, in Munich on Oct. 16, Yu confirmed. He declined to detail new features, but the phones are expected to boast large, 6-inch-plus full-screen displays, tech blogs predict. Artificial intelligence (AI) built into its new chips can help make phones more personalized, or anticipate the actions and interests of their users, Yu said.

The telecommunications industry is on the verge of a major transformation through the use of advanced analytics and big data technologies like the MapR Converged Data Platform. The MapR Guide to Big Data in Telecommunications is designed to help you understand the trends and technologies behind this data driven telecommunications revolution. In this week's Whiteboard Walkthrough Ted Dunning, Chief Application Architect at MapR, explains in detail how to use streaming IoT sensor data from handsets and devices as well as cell tower data to detect strange anomalies. He takes us from best practices for data architecture, including the advantages of multi-master writes with MapR Streams, through analysis of the telecom data using clustering methods to discover normal and anomalous behaviors. I'd like to talk a little bit about data processing in the context of telecom.

Huawei launched the latest mobile Kirin 970 chipset that has its own AI processor built-in. The announcement was made during the ongoing IFA tech show in Berlin. The Kirin 970 chip is powered by an octa-core CPU and the latest generation 12-core GPU. The Chinese smartphone company says the mobile chipset will be built using on a 10nm manufacturing process, similar to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 and Samsung's Exynos 8895 chipsets. It will also support HDR 10, and 4K video recording at 60 frames per second (fps).

Huawei has unveiled an artificial intelligence based chipset -- the Kirin 970 which would be featured in its upcoming Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro smartphones. The company claims that its processor will outperform offerings from major smartphone companies such as Samsung and Apple. "Compared with Samsung and Apple, we have advantages. Users are in for much faster (feature) performance, longer battery life and more compact design," Richard Yu, CEO, Huawei Consumer Business said in an interview at IFA 2017 in Berlin on Sunday. Huawei's model will use AI-based features such as image recognition and will make phones more personalized and more importantly -- efficient.