The Galaxy S8 with Bixby will be the successor to last year's the S7 handsets. NEW YORK--Ahead of the March 29 launch of its next flagship smartphone, Samsung has confirmed that the Galaxy S8 will have a new voice-driven digital assistant named Bixby, molded by artificial intelligence. S8 owners will be able to summon Bixby on the phone at the press of a button. Samsung revealed some general details on Bixby in a blog posted Monday by InJong Rhee, the company's executive vice president and head of R&D, for software and services. Rhee did not mention in his post whether Samsung will leverage the conversational-based voice technology developed by Viv Labs, a startup Samsung bought in October.

Watch out Siri, there is a new virtual assistant in town. Samsung has unveiled its intelligent interface that will live in the firm's highly-anticipated Galaxy S8 smartphone set to launch next week. Unlike the other AI assistants on the market, Bixby is specifically design to'make using your phone even more seamless and intuitive'. Users can make apps Bixby-enabled, which will let Bixby support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using the conventional interface. Any task a human user can do via touch commands, the AI will have the ability to do as well.

A digital assistant that lets you do everything with voice commands instead of poking, swiping, and tapping at your phone. It's a bold, unproven promise that Samsung says it's bringing to its next smartphone, the Galaxy S8. The new assistant is called Bixby, a sequel of sorts to S Voice, the voice-control app Samsung launched years ago but has since hidden on recent devices. In a blog post announcing Bixby, Samsung says the assistant will debut on still-unannounced Galaxy S8 and activate with a dedicated button. Samsung promises Bixby will let you control everything on your phone and Bixby-powered apps with your voice.

Declining birth rate, aging population, natural disasters, pollution: Do these sound like issues the IT industry can deal with? Japanese businesses say yes, and a number of them are at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, to explain why. Industry 4.0 -- the building of "smart factories" in which machines monitor one another and make decentralized decisions about production and maintenance -- has been a theme of recent Cebit shows. Now, under the banner Society 5.0, the show's partner country for 2017, Japan, wants to take the transformation beyond industry, making "smart society" one of the show's talking points. Behind the drive are some very real societal problems.

The launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 March 29 will represent a comeback for the company's mobile unit, which is recovering by the Galaxy Note 7 disaster. What's unclear is how Samsung Galaxy S8 flagship phone will fare given the multiple unknowns the company is facing. Samsung's Galaxy S8 lands amid a backdrop of the company's January report on what went wrong with the Note 7 and how it is fixing its processes to prevent battery problems in the future. That report went a long way to allaying fears, but brand recoveries take time. The device will have new artificial intelligence tools via a service called Bixby.

Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the mobile industry's biggest annual trade show. Falling shortly after CES, which was this year dominated by Amazon Alexa-enabled smart things, MWC is now in its 31st year, bringing together 100,000 attendees to exhibit, innovate, and debate all things mobile. Apple doesn't attend officially, and this year Samsung was not announcing anything huge in terms of new wearables or mobiles, which opened the way for the indie players and middle-of-the-field brands to get more exposure for their new trinkets and widgets. But MWC has not been about mobile handsets for a while. Instead, it focuses on the wider mobile ecosystem and how that is transforming our world.

The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone will utilize its facial recognition technology to assist with mobile payment processing, according to a report from Bloomberg. As Bloomberg notes, the S8's facial recognition technology will work alongside the smartphone's rear fingerprint sensor and iris sensor to process payments via Samsung Pay. The combination of all three features is intended to compensate for their respective gaps: while iris technology works well without needing lots of ambient light, facial recognition sensors work faster at recognizing your facial features. Facial recognition on the Galaxy S8 was initially speculated at earlier this month, but Bloomberg's report is the first indication on how thorough the technology's integration with the new smartphone will be. As smartphone companies work to separate their models from the competition, facial recognition is a feature that's also seen increasing interest from developers.

The LG G6 hasn't yet hit the shelves, but carriers have started making efforts to entice customers. T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint and US Cellular are all offering a free Google Home speaker (priced at $129) on the purchase of the device. The offer ends April 30 or until supplies last, whichever comes first. In addition to the Google Home speaker, carriers are also offering other freebies with the device. T-Mobile is offering the G6 for a EMI of $26 a month for 24 months along with a $26 down payment, which makes the total cost of the handset $650.

Several U.S. carriers have now confirmed that the LG G6 release date will be April 7. T-Mobile and AT&T have also revealed their prices for the 2017 flagship. T-Mobile will sell the LG G6 for $650 or $26 down and $26 per month for 24 months as per the network's payment plan. T-Mobile is also offering customers who purchase the LG G6 before April 30 a free Google Home AI assistant. AT&T will sell the LG G6 for $720 or $30 per month for 24 months as per the network's payment plan. In addition to a free Google Home, AT&T is also offering a second LG G6 for free when starting a new service line.

Home, as you likely know by now, is Google's Echo-like AI voice helper that uses Google Assistant instead of Amazon's Alexa. Given that it just launched recently, it has limited capabilities compared to the rival device, but it does use Google's massive and sophisticated search engine -- for better or for worse. Up until now, you could only access Assistant via Home, Google's Allo chat app and Pixel phones, but the search giant recently announced that it would roll out to other recent Android phones as well. T-Mobile carriers will pay $26 down and $26 a month for two years for a total $650 price, while AT&T will let buyers have it via the Next phone trade-up program for $24 a month over 30 months. However, AT&T is also throwing in a second LG G6, assuming you add an additional line on your Next program, and giving buyers the option to pick up an LG Watch Sport for $50.