The next flagship phone from Samsung, the Galaxy S8, is expected to arrive early next year with a major new feature: a built-in intelligent digital assistant. The artificial intelligence will be made possible by Samsung's acquisition of Viv Labs, which was announced last month. Founded by two of the creators of Siri, Apple's signature digital assistant, Viv Labs said its technology represents a "new paradigm" for how people interact with computers. The Viv AI uses something called dynamic program generation that creates software on the fly based on the intent of the request given to it. In a briefing reported yesterday by Reuters, Samsung said the addition of Viv's technology to the Galaxy S8 will enable a wide variety of new services for its customers.

Hal, Ex-Machina, the Terminator and Matrix movies, and I, Robot all trade on the beloved sci-fi meme of robotized AI and the public's collective psyche when it all goes wrong: fascination and fear. After all, if machines become faster, stronger, and brighter than humanity, why wouldn't they turn on their soft, meaty, and dim creators for either enslavement or a full-on purge?

At the recent Spark & Machine Learning Meetup in Brussels, Koen Dejonghe of Eurocontrol delivered a lightning talk titled "Simulation and processing of data streams in telecommunications." Specifically, Koen discussed the development of a prototype for processing of data coming from cell towers, executed for a telco operator in the Middle East--with the added difficulty that the customer could not provide real data. In the end, Koen developed a data generator in Scala/Akka, a data processor with Spark Streaming, and a visualization front-end with Node.js.

The lab they have created has also had some big wins, not only for them, but also for the networks on which their phones run. For instance, their work has helped carriers across the world to reduce their pay-as-you-go customer churn rate from 10% to 6%. They have been working on a machine learning driven network control system, which will achieve automated network traffic control. 'Tests indicate that Network Mind is up to 500% more efficient in realizing KPIs such as task completion or policy generation compared to existing template or heuristic algorithm-based optimization methods. Network Mind is also over 50 times more efficient when analyzing paths of large optical networks, which has the potential to reduce the time it takes to analyze use cases such as optical network failure prevention from 5 hours to as little as 6 minutes.'

Samsung needs a break badly. And so they are probably working very hard on the upcoming new flagship on what we suppose will be the Galaxy S8. This will be a major test for them, to see if the smartphone will be good enough for people to forgive them for the whole Galaxy Note 7 debacle. One of the things they have confirmed is that they will be launching an artificial intelligence digital assistant as part of the flagship. Just last month, Samsung announced that they were acquiring Viv Labs Inc, which was actually run by someone highly familiar with voice assistant programs, as he was the co-creator of Apple's Siri.

Samsung dominates the smartphone industry so much so that one in every five handsets sold worldwide come from the South Korean technology giant. But the firm is still reeling from the recall of millions of its big-screen Galaxy Note 7 devices, which suffered from a battery issue that could cause the device to overheat and, in some cases, explode. That recall left Samsung without a flashy new smartphone to go head-to-head with Apple's iPhone 7 and Google's Pixel as the all-important holiday shopping season approaches. "In a market that is otherwise maturing, Christmas has come early for vendors looking to capitalize with large-screened flagship alternatives like the Apple iPhone 7 Plus and Google Pixel," said IDC analyst Melissa Chau in a report accompanying the research firm's latest smartphone sales estimates. With the Note 7 dead and buried, Samsung must look towards the future for salvation.

SEOUL-- Samsung Electronics Co. is looking to give its Siri-like virtual assistant a big promotion. The South Korean smartphone giant is considering a hardware revamp for its next flagship smartphone that could add a dedicated button for an improved artificial-intelligence feature, people familiar with the matter said, as it seeks to woo smartphone users after a disastrous product recall last month. The latest internal prototypes of the premium Galaxy S8 handset include a button on the side edge of the smartphone that would be used to launch a beefed-up virtual assistant based on artificial intelligence, akin to Apple Inc.'s Siri, according to these people, who cautioned that the prototypes aren't final and could change. Samsung will have more time than usual to tinker with the Galaxy S8 after it was forced to discontinue its premium Galaxy Note 7 smartphone last month, following reports of phones catching fire. The embarrassing fiasco damaged the company's brand and engineers still don't know exactly what caused the devices to overheat.

Anti-drone defense systems are about to become big business. T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom has confirmed to Welt am Sonntag that it's developing an anti-drone defense system that should launch this year. It's not discussing details, but it would be offered as a security feature for airports, stadiums and other venues where robotic flyers are unwelcome or outright dangerous. Reportedly, car manufacturers are particularly eager for Deutsche Telekom's help -- they're annoyed by journalists (and no doubt competitors) using drones to snap photos of pre-production cars. Welt sources understand that the system (which was tested in July) involves technology from multiple companies, including US-based Dedrone.

Samsung has announced that the upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone will include the company's own digital assistant. Executive Vice President Rhee Injong told Reuters that the acquisition of Viv Labs will power the new platform, which will also expand into the wearables and other smart home devices. Injon hinted that third-party services will also be able to connect to the platform, which is a key part of making AI more useful. "Developers can attach and upload services to our agent," she said. "Even if Samsung doesn't do anything on its own, the more services that get attached the smarter this agent will get, learn more new services and provide them to end-users with ease."

Google has finally launched an own-brand smartphone, the Pixel, to challenge Apple head on and provide a premium Android experience with the hardware tailored to the software by the people who actually make it.. The new smartphone succeeds Google's Nexus line of devices and the company claims that the Pixel is now 100% Google, unlike the Nexus devices where Google provided the software and had some input into the devices but not total control. The Pixel phone joins the Pixel C Android tablet and Chromebook Pixel as Google's first in-house devices. But for Google, the Pixel isn't just a smartphone, it's a referendum on whether Google as a brand sells. With an all-metal body, all-glass display, rock-solid build, fingerprint scanner and headphones socket, the Pixel ticks most of the boxes expected of top-end smartphone, except for a lack of waterproofing. How attractive it is as a design divides opinion.