Artificial intelligence (AI) may be the next big thing for communications service providers (CSPs), but it's not clear yet exactly how they will use it or where it will have the biggest impact on their business. "Let's break it down a bit – it can be misleading," Telefónica Global Group's CIO, Phil Jordan, told attendees at the Executive Summit during TM Forum Live!. "We see clear use cases and value in cognitive and machine learning. Any decision we take in a systemic way, I have asked for a plan for when and where does that become a machine-learned activity? "It's the next transformation wave that is going to hit all of us – converting decision-making into something that isn't static rule-based," he adds. "I don't think that's a technology problem – it's here or it's coming." But is Telefónica making extensive use of AI today? "We made no use of it in the transformation," Jordan emphasized in discussing the company's massive digital transformation. "AI isn't a magic trick," he says, and it won't be useful unless operators transform their existing IT systems first. Indeed, that's the message we've been hearing from many of our members: AI is promising but it isn't reality – yet. In November we will publish an extensive Trend Analysis Report on AI and machine learning, analyzing the results of our surveys of CSPs and suppliers (choose the right one for you). Take the survey and you'll be entered into a draw for a $250 Amazon gift voucher. Certainly, new virtualized network functionality and new operational and business support systems are needed to take advantage of AI and machine learning (a form of AI), in customer facing applications such as virtual agents and chatbots and for end-to-end network and service management. "You have to teach it; you have to give the machine context all the time," Jordan explains. "You have to have a business that is ready and able to understand outcomes and go back and feed it into machine learning.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Huawei [HWT.UL] 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 Wu, 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, Wu 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, Wu said.

A big part of Huawei's multi-year push to improve its image has been improving the hardware it builds to go inside them, and its latest processor is more than up to the challenge. Unveiled today at IFA 2017, the Kirin 970 chipset goes beyond the initial machine learning implementation of previous designs and is ready to be an AI processing powerhouse. Earlier this year Huawei introduced "the intelligent phone" with its Mate 9 (pictured above), but the new hardware could help fix some annoying AI-related drawbacks of the device. While AI work done in the cloud is one thing, on-device AI computation will continue to grow, with the need for sensors to operate without waiting to send any information back and forth over wireless connections. Native AI processing will enable faster image and voice recognition, as well as "intelligent photography." A few people first spotted some specifications at the company's IFA booth, showing that it's sticking to last generation's octa-core setup with four 2.4Ghz Cortex-A73 processors and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A53 cores, but produced using an improved 10nm process instead of the old 12nm.

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.