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.

Qualcomm Technologies (QCOM) announced that it has acquired machine learning startup Scyfer for an undisclosed amount. Scyfer B.V. is a startup that is affiliated with University of Amsterdam and focuses on applying machine learning techniques to different fields. Through the acquisition, Qualcomm hopes to further incorporate AI technology into different devices, including cars, machines and robotics. Netherlands-based Scyfer was founded in 2013 to provide AI for companies in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare and finance. Management was headed by Co-founder and CTO Tijmen Blankevoort, who was previously co-founder of Cyno Intelligent System.

Qualcomm has unveiled its roadmap for bringing artificial intelligence capabilities to smart devices and goals to bring complementary AI features to the cloud. Sparked in 2007, Qualcomm's efforts to improve AI services use neuron-based approaches to machine learning, and their efforts aim to make AI a cornerstone of most digital-enabled products, including automobiles and machinery. Qualcomm's initial AI efforts, before the smart device boom was in full swing, initially focused on motion control and computer vision applications, fields inspired by biological counterparts. Their efforts later extended into neural net fields supplemented by deep learning algorithms. On August 16, 2017, Qualcomm further expanded their capabilities by purchasing the University of Amsterdam-affiliated Scyfer BV, an AI-focused company with experience in healthcare, finance, and manufacturing.

Scyfer was established about four years ago at Amsterdam Science Park as a spinoff of the University of Amsterdam. The company works with the latest and most advanced technologies in the field of deep learning. Founder and CEO of Scyfer is Max Welling, professor of Machine Learning at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Amsterdam. He is also employed at the University of California Irvine, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).

Google has just pushed an update to its Home smart speaker that lets you make calls to any phone number in the US and Canada for free. As with its other features, you can place a call with your voice: just say, "Hey Google, Call Abhimanyu," or whoever else you've been dying to talk to, and it'll do your bidding instantly over Wi-Fi. It'll recognize your voice to load your own contacts, so when you ask it to "Call Dad," it'll phone your father and not someone else's. Plus, you can also ask Home to ring businesses by name, even if they aren't stored in your contact list. With that, Google might have just replaced your landline and beat Amazon et al to the punch as well. Echo speakers can currently talk to each other, but not to phones; Apple and Microsoft are yet to introduce these features in their upcoming smart speakers.

You probably don't have a landline phone, because it's not 1995. But you miss it sometimes, don't you? Knowing where the phone was all the time, having something anyone could pick up and use, avoiding the rock-paper-scissors over who has to waste their cell phone battery calling Dominos. Earlier this year at its developer conference, Google promised to turn its Home smart speaker into a sort of futuristic landline. You can now call any business or person in your contacts, as long as they live in the US or Canada, just by asking Google to do so.

Big changes are coming to your phone's smartphone camera next year, with Qualcomm previewing an update to its image signal processor (ISP) that will better support features like face recognition and mixed reality. Qualcomm's Spectra ISP is a part of the Snapdragon system on chip that's a popular mobile processor platform for many Android phones. While the next major Snapdragon update won't arrive until next year, the changes planned for the Spectra ISP have major implications not just for the cameras on 2018 Android phones but for virtual- and augmented reality headsets as well. That's because the next version of the Spectra ISP introduces a new architecture to support advances in image quality, image recognition and power efficiency. Specifically, Qualcomm is promising that its new camera module will feature improved biometric sensing for detecting people's faces and support for depth sensing that can power mixed reality features for smartphones and headsets.

Dual cameras are so passé. Qualcomm is getting ready to define the next generation of cameras for the Android ecosystem. It's adding three new camera modules to its Spectra Module Program, which lets device manufacturers select ready-made parts for their products. The additions are an iris-authentication front-facing option, an "Entry-Level Computer Vision" setup and a "Premium Computer Vision" kit. The latter two carry out passive and active depth-sensing respectively, using Qualcomm's newly revamped image signal processing (ISP) architecture.