The Lenovo Smart Display gives Google Assistant a face and, well, it's kind of beautiful. As promised at CES and then again at Google I/O, Lenovo is finally rolling out the first Google Assistant device with a display, delivering a fresh new spin on the smart home speaker. While Amazon has been selling its Echo Show for more than a year (and the smaller Echo Spot for about half as long), Google has taken its time with building its visual Assistant. We've seen glimpses of it on our phones, cars, and TVs (using Chromecast for the last), but Google Assistant on the Lenovo Smart Display isn't just a cobbling together of Assistant's existing screen appearances. It's an entirely new interface that adds a deep new dimension to Assistant, at once showing the limitation of voice and opening up Google's AI to far more possibilities.

Voice assistants are like sleep, magnets, or Advil: We're happy to have them, even if we don't really get how they work. You can ask a question of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Assistant, and boom: it speaks a factual answer. More impressively still, you can kid around with your voice assistant, and it'll kid right back, tossing back your goofball question ("What's the meaning of life?") with a goofball answer ("All signs indicate chocolate"). But how can an artificially intelligent being have humor, sass, and tact? How can a blob of code have a personality? Behind the scenes, human teams at Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google write every joke, program every trivia game, hammer out subroutines to handle everything you might say.

Following up on February's revealing comparison of smart speaker AI assistants, Loup Ventures today published its "annual digital assistant IQ test," tracking the performance of the four major AI assistants on smartphones. The firm suggested that Google's Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana have all improved over the past year, but surprisingly claimed a big improvement in Siri, while saying that Cortana fell well behind Amazon's Alexa. Loup used the same set of 800 questions for each digital assistant, and spread them across five categories: local, commerce, navigation, information, and command. To better reflect the capabilities of modern assistants, this year's questions were modified from ones used in a similar April 2017 test, somewhat muddying direct year-to-year comparisons. Overall, the clear winner of the test was Google's Assistant, which correctly understood 100 percent of questions, and had the most correct answers at 85.5 percent.

Mobile app development is revolutionizing our lives turning impossible into reality. Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be unanimous choice of industry analysts. Right from chatbots, context-aware smart sensors to predictive analytics, developers and businesses are exploring innovative ways to utilize Artificial intelligence to deliver better customer service, new products and reimagine business processes. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning is causing an unprecedented change in the way that developers, businesses, and users think about modeling algorithms and intelligent interactions within applications. Machine learning is no longer in its nascent phase.

Jack Shepherd had a polished seduction routine. He would take women out for expensive meals and thrilling rides on his speedboat. But one night his fixation on trying to impress went horribly wrong when he killed his date, Charlotte Brown. Shepherd met Charlotte - or Charli, as she was known - for the first time on a December night in 2015. Before that, they'd got to know each other online through the dating website OkCupid.

Amazon may have pioneered the smart-speaker movement, but Google isn't far behind. A year after Amazon debuted the first Echo, Google followed in its footsteps with the Home. The company copied Amazon yet again with the Home Mini, which is its version of the Echo Dot. Last year, Amazon revealed the Echo Show -- an smart speaker with a display. And, sure enough, earlier this year, Google announced that it, too, was getting into the smart-display category.

Lenovo will start shipping the first Google Assistant smart display this weekend, marking the birth of a new range of products that could eventually include some of Echo Show's staunchest rivals. Similar to what Echo Show does, Google's smart displays will give you a way to interact with the tech giant's voice assistant in a visual way. We first met the new devices at CES this year, where we were impressed with their ability to instantly display maps and send them to your phone when you ask for directions. Certainly beats listening and trying to visualize them. Here's another instance where a smart display can be much easier to use than a smart speaker: Assistant will also provide a step-by-step visual aid for recipes you look up that you can follow on screen.

Lenovo Smart Display is Google's play against Amazon's Echo Show. If the Google Assistant is primed to compete against Amazon's Alexa in a game of "show and tell," it has its work cut out for it. Beginning this weekend, Lenovo becomes the first of Google's consumer tech partners to bring out a Google Smart Display smart speaker, which has a screen to visually complement whatever you ask the Google Assistant, woken up with a familiar "OK Google" or "Hey Google" voice command. In so doing, Google (via Lenovo) is pitted against its most obvious direct competitor, the Echo Show from Amazon, which was the first of the Alexa-based smart speakers to add a display. I was able to use the Lenovo Smart Display to surface my Google Calendar and Google Photos, watch news from CNN and Reuters, set timers, play music on Spotify, make a video call through the Google Duo app, and check out YouTube videos on such topics as making sushi. As with the Google Home speakers without a screen, you can use Smart Displays to control such things as your Nest thermostats and Philips Hue lightbulbs.

Earlier this year, my home was infested with smart speakers--I've used a lot of them at this point. But I've never used an Alexa device as dedicated to the cause as the Polk Command Bar, a soundbar that wants to be an Amazon Echo so badly that it's practically in cosplay. It's designed to look like engineers smushed an Amazon Echo Dot right into the center of it. In many ways, that's precisely what Polk did. Polk worked closely with Amazon's Alexa team for two years to design the Command Bar, and had to get special approval to place an Echo-style glowing blue ring, along with mute, volume, and action buttons front-and-center.

Voice-enabled smart devices is set to be the new game changer in consumers' lives.Andria Cheng Amazon has made Alexa practically a household name as the voice-assistant-enabled Fire TV stick and Echo devices rank among its best sellers and gives the online giant a dominant lead in the growing smart speaker market. But you'd be wrong to think that lead came just from those big discounts Amazon gave on the likes of Prime Day. On the campus of New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark on Tuesday, 2,500 developers, marketers, executives and other attendees from Panasonic and Lego to Capital One and Johnson & Johnson gathered for the three-day inaugural Voice Summit. While Amazon rivals like Microsoft and Google were also among attendees, the Seattle giant's presence was not to be missed: it's the event's largest sponsor among dozens. At the conference, which ends Thursday, attendees could hang out with Amazon Alexa staff and learn to code and ask questions, besides listening to various Amazon executives talking about the direction of voice and learning about Alexa initiatives across industries from retail and education to finance and healthcare.