That's because these chatty device are thought to be adding the ability to handle voice calls. Both devices need to continue to earn their place in your home, and according to the Wall Street Journal, adding the ability to make and receive calls is high up the list of forthcoming features. If it happens, it's going to happen this year. The big difference between Google and Amazon in this regard is that Google does have an advantage in the form of Google Voice. Voice already offers voice calls, text messaging, voicemail, and call forwarding features, so Google could just hook Voice up to Home devices. Amazon does not have an equivalent service to simply bolt on.

In the voice assistant market, Apple has Siri, Google has Google Assistant, Microsoft has Cortana. There are also voice assistants that aren't natively integrated into phones or computers, such as SoundHound's Hound and Amazon's Alexa. We have also heard that Samsung is planning their own voice assistant called "Bixby". This is why it doesn't really come as a complete surprise to learn that Huawei could be working on their own voice assistant platform as well. This comes from a report from Bloomberg in which people familiar with the matter told the publication about Huawei's plans.

Huawei, the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, is reportedly working on its own digital voice-activated assistant. The company's AI assistant will soon be competing with Apple's Siri, Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. Huawei has formed a team with over 100 engineers in Shenzhen, China which is currently in early stages of development for the new digital smart assistant, according to one of Bloomberg. Huawei's digital assistant will be aimed at Chinese customers meaning it will communicate in Chinese languages. One of Bloomberg's sources claimed that Huawei will continue to work with Google and Amazon when it comes to providing other services to its phones internationally.

Last year, Huawei leapfrogged a couple of fellow Chinese hardware companies to secure its spot as the third largest smartphone maker worldwide. As the company takes aim at the number two spot, it's apparently working to differentiate itself even more from the competition by developing more proprietary tech, adding to a list of components that already includes its own in-house chips. According to a new report from Bloomberg, a smart assistant is the next step. The company is said to be hard at work on a Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant competitor, employing a team of more than 100 people tasked with its creation in Shenzhen. If true, the company would join Samsung in a growing list of Android handset makers opting not to go with Google's assistant – though the Galaxy maker sped up the process a bit with its recent acquisition of Viv Labs.

It may soon be possible to make or answer phone calls through an Amazon Echo or Google Home, The Wall Street Journal reports. Both Amazon and Google are reportedly working on new features that would enable their Internet-connected speakers to work as telephones. The functionality could launch sometime this year. Still, there are a number of concerns to overcome before Google and Amazon can integrate phone calls into their devices, the Journal notes, mostly around privacy, telecom involvement, and emergency services. For one, people may be uncomfortable having phone conversations on a device that's capable of recording speech.

We present an approach to incentivising monitoring for norm violations in open multi-agent systems such as Wikipedia. In such systems, there is no crisp definition of a norm violation; rather, it is a matter of judgement whether an agent's behaviour conforms to generally accepted standards of behaviour. Agents may legitimately disagree about borderline cases. Using ideas from scrip systems and peer prediction, we show how to design a mechanism that incentivises agents to monitor each other's behaviour for norm violations. The mechanism keeps the probability of undetected violations (submissions that the majority of the community would consider not conforming to standards) low, and is robust against collusion by the monitoring agents.

When Japanese mobile phone company SoftBank offered 1000 of its emotionally intelligent Pepper robots for the consumer market last summer, the entire run sold out in under a minute. At CES this year, SoftBank announced that IBM would be bringing Watson's artificial intelligence to Pepper, a bid to ready the robot for broad adoption in the home. Now SoftBank is planning to branch into the U.S. At Google IO today, the company announced that it's opening up a new developer portal and adding SDK Android Studio to enable the development of custom applications for Pepper, continuing to evolve it's capabilities ahead of its U.S. launch, which it's planning later this year. "We'll also be announcing the opening of SoftBank's U.S. office, headquartered in San Francisco, which will be driving the efforts surrounding the launch of Pepper in the U.S.," a company spokesman told me. Today's announcement came along with a demonstration of Pepper's functionality and features for developers.

The Galaxy S8 may come with a curved screen like the one on this, the Galaxy S7 Edge. The Galaxy S8 is shaping up to be perhaps the most important smartphone Samsung has ever developed, and rumours about the details of its specs continue to emerge. According to The Wall Street Journal the home button may be removed from the front of the smartphone and moved to the back, freeing up space for the screen -- something that Samsung's Chinese rival Huawei did on its P9 smartphone last year. The paper reports that the device, which is expected to be launched later this month, will come with a curved screen as standard, a feature Samsung debuted on its Galaxy S6 Edge and which has proved popular with customers. The S8 will also feature a Samsung-developed voice-powered digital assistant which will apparently be called Bixby, in an attempt to rival Apple's Siri and Google Now.

It's very likely that you'll see Google Assistant on new Android devices beyond the Pixel line, but when... and what about the device you already have? The AI helper might be coming sooner than you think. Google has inadvertently given beta testers an alpha release of its Android search app that enables Assistant support on non-Pixel hardware. It's not working for everyone, but people carrying everything from the Nexus 6P to Alcatel's Idol 4S say they've had success. The software has introductory messages that are clearly targeted at people who previously didn't have Assistant, so it's not an accidental inclusion.

Major smartphone makers are following Apple and Google into the smartphone trend of 2017: artificial intelligence. LG's G6 could feature Google Assistant, Samsung said its Galaxy S8 will feature its own AI assistant, and Huawei's Mate 9 is the first phone with Amazon's Alexa. The Chinese conglomerate has been especially vocal about AI in their smartphones--unusual for top smartphone makers, who are normally secretive about their latest devices. Huawei said they will have an AI-focused "Superphone" in 2020--just a year before their goal to be the world's top smartphone maker. The Chinese tech giant has been sitting at No. 3 since last year, behind Samsung and Apple.