O2 has announced plans to introduce an AI capable of performing the same job as customer service staff. The voice recognition system, which is called Aura, was unveiled by the mobile operator's parent company Telefonica at MWC this week. It's expected to launch in the UK next year, and will enable the company to cut customer service costs. Aura would be able to deal with customers' issues over the phone, such as questions about bills and requests to make changes to existing mobile plans. Telefonica also believes that Aura will help it boost customer loyalty, by allowing the firm to hand customers' data back to them.

The legend is that Almon Strowger invented automatic telephone switching in order to stop human operators deliberately or accidentally misdirecting phone calls. This was an early (patented 1891) example of using machinery to improve security and reliability in the telecommunications network. However, it was primarily the need to manage growth that drove automation of the phone system. And since then, through various stages of electromechanical, electronic and computer driven developments, the telecommunications networks of the world have benefited from increasingly high levels of automation. Most of this time, the underlying pattern of advancement stayed the same.

They're old ideas, but machine learning and AI are now the communications industry's hot buzzwords, judging from last week's Mobile World Congress. "For mobile operators around the world, this is no longer an experiment," said Patrick Ostiguy, CEO of Accedian, during an MWC panel discussion on machine learning. Machine learning, which involves training a computer by feeding it examples and counterexamples, has been around for decades. The post office's optical mail-sorting machines are one example. True AI and deep learning, which strive to teach a brain how to teach itself, are also long-standing disciplines.

Chinese electronics company Huawei is now the world's third-biggest mobile phone manufacturer – though it's still a brand many people don't know well. Its latest releases, the Huawei P10 and P10 Plus, build on last year's P9 by lavishing improvements all round and adding a notable extra focus on colour. While it's become common in recent years for premium phones to be presented in metallic colour variants (gold, silver, rose gold), it's been left to more affordable handsets, usually clad in plastic casing, to go for bright hues. Think the Apple iPhone 5C or models from HTC and, until recently, Microsoft. Huawei has gone further, producing its top-of-the-range P10 in eight shades, yes eight. One of them, rose gold, will only be available in China.

Samsung is set to launch the highly anticipated Galaxy S8 later this month, but new reports suggest the handset's release has been delayed. The smartphone had been expected to hit the shelves on 21 April, but it appears that Samsung has decided to push its plans back by a week. The S8 will instead hit the market on 28 April, according to VentureBeat. The reason behind the apparent delay is unknown, but the company won't want to take any chances in terms of safety or reliability following the Galaxy Note 7 disaster. Samsung itself is yet to announce an official release date for the handset, but numerous leaks over the past several weeks have all pointed at 21 April.

The Mobile World Congress, which takes place annually in Barcelona, is usually dominated by smartphones. Grabbing headlines this year, however, is the Pilot earpiece and its promise to instantly translate languages: a real-life version of the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is not the first time that elements of science fiction from Douglas Adams's story have subsequently become science fact. The technology that allows the Hitchhiker's Guide to be operated simply by brushing with one's fingers is now familiar from smartphones and tablets. The information the Guide stores, meanwhile, is user-generated, and constantly updated; the approach adopted by Wikipedia.

Indoor localization based on SIngle Of Fingerprint (SIOF) is rather susceptible to the changing environment, multipath, and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation. Building SIOF is also a very time-consuming process. Recently, we first proposed a GrOup Of Fingerprints (GOOF) to improve the localization accuracy and reduce the burden of building fingerprints. However, the main drawback is the timeliness. In this paper, we propose a novel localization framework by Fusing A Group Of fingerprinTs (FAGOT) based on random forests. In the offline phase, we first build a GOOF from different transformations of the received signals of multiple antennas. Then, we design multiple GOOF strong classifiers based on Random Forests (GOOF-RF) by training each fingerprint in the GOOF. In the online phase, we input the corresponding transformations of the real measurements into these strong classifiers to obtain multiple independent decisions. Finally, we propose a Sliding Window aIded Mode-based (SWIM) fusion algorithm to balance the localization accuracy and time. Our proposed approaches can work better in an unknown indoor scenario. The burden of building fingerprints can also be reduced drastically. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithms through simulations and real experimental data using two Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) platforms.

Taking a look back at seven days of news and headlines across the world of Android, this week's Android Circuit includes Samsung's efforts to spoil MWC, new images leaked of the Galaxy S8, asking if the new Nokia handsets are worthy of the Nokia name, a hands-on review of the Nokia 5, the LG G6 design, Huawei's new camera technology, the return of the BlackBerry keyboard, and the designer of the Psion PDA returning with an Android dream machine. Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week (and you can find the weekly Apple news digest here). Although it had previously declared that it would not be announced the Galaxy S8 at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the South Korean company announced when it would be announcing its new flagship. It looks like a tactical move to remind consumers not to fall in love with the new devices from MWC until it can consider Samsung's latest: But today's news about the Galaxy S8 launch wasn't about reassuring the public. It was about taking away some of the momentum that the S8's rivals could gain from Mobile World Congress.

Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank Group Corp., believes that within 30 years, artificial intelligence will be smarter than the human brain. The Wall Street Journal reports that Son made the prediction at Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry's biggest trade show, which is currently being held in Barcelona, Spain. Not only does Son think that super smart robots will outnumber humans in 30 years, but more than a trillion objects will be connected to the internet. "That is why I'm in a hurry to aggregate cash to invest," he said. SoftBank has made quite a few recent deals, including purchasing British microprocessor designer ARM Holdings PLC for $32 billion, as well as U.S. asset manager Fortress Investment Group PLC for $3.3 billion. Son plans to ramp up the research-and-development funding for ARM, which designs the basic architecture for chips in more than 95 percent of smartphones around the world.

That's a phrase none of us has uttered yet, but the day when voice assistants go beyond helping us simply complete transactions to facilitating deeper human-to-human relationships is rapidly approaching. In fact, Amazon and Google are rumored to be adding voice calling to Echo and Google Home. While today people might ask Alexa for their bank balance, voice is ultimately about human conversation, which might lead you to doing something like connecting with your financial advisor. The news that Amazon and Google are working on adding voice calling to Alexa and Google Home isn't a harking back to simpler times, nor is it a concerted effort to kill the home landline. Rather, it's an acknowledgement that while voice assistants are great at completing transactional tasks, people still want to have human conversations, such as getting someone's opinion or walking through a complex purchase.