China: Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi is trying to speed up its global expansion with the help of Microsoft. The company on Friday entered into an agreement with Microsoft to explore Microsoft's AI technology and cloud services into Xiaomi hardware. In a statement, Xiaomi said it aims to make its "products and services better fit the global market" through this partnership. The two companies have plenty to gain from each other. The Friday agreement binds the two companies to cooperate on Microsoft AI-powered products including its Bing search engine, Edge internet browser, and digital assistant Cortana, among others.

Samsung's Bixby-enabled smart speaker is coming in the second half of this year. At Mobile World Congress, DJ Koh, President of Samsung's mobile division confirmed that the much rumored Bixby speaker will be launched in the second half of 2018. The smart speaker segment is currently led by Amazon and Google, and has suddenly caught attention among consumers as evident by the increase in sales of Google Home speakers during the holiday season. The rise in their popularity has led to more companies entering the segment. Apple recently launched its HomePod with Siri built-in, while Microsoft has partnered Harmon Kardon to launch Invoke speaker with Cortana built-in.

As artificial intelligence technology improves and matures, it will move on from an Apple Siri or a Google Assistant merely answering your questions to becoming your best friend and adviser. As per research firm Gartner Inc, personal devices such as mobile phones will know more about an individual's emotional state than his or her own family by 2022. According to statistics website Statista, the number of mobile phone users in India is expected to rise to 775.5 million in 2018. The number of smartphone users is expected to reach almost 443 million by 2022. In a report last year, networking company Cisco said India will have 1,380 million mobile-connected devices in India by 2021, with 60 percent of these being "smart" mobile connections. This means that Indians are looking at a huge number of "friendly" devices that will be able to detect human emotions and provide an option according to their moods.

A new book by two industry titans predicts that in the near future everyone will have a digital "alter ego". The book "The Future Computed" comes from Microsoft's President Brad Smith and the EVP of AI and Research Harry Shum. In this freely-available (and worth checking out) look into what's just around the bend, the two argue that companies have to embrace AI if they want to be successful going forward. But progress can move faster if researchers do not sit on the knowledge they are developing but share it with competitors, ensuring that AI will reach its full potential. One big AI advancement that the two tech gurus predict will be created within the next 20 years is the advent of digital assistants.

The changes in user preferences can originate from substantial reasons, like personality shift, or transient and circumstantial ones, like seasonal changes in item popularities. Disregarding these temporal drifts in modelling user preferences can result in unhelpful recommendations. Moreover, different temporal patterns can be associated with various preference domains, and preference components and their combinations. These components comprise preferences over features, preferences over feature values, conditional dependencies between features, socially-influenced preferences, and bias. For example, in the movies domain, the user can change his rating behaviour (bias shift), her preference for genre over language (feature preference shift), or start favouring drama over comedy (feature value preference shift). In this paper, we first propose a novel latent factor model to capture the domain-dependent component-specific temporal patterns in preferences. The component-based approach followed in modelling the aspects of preferences and their temporal effects enables us to arbitrarily switch components on and off. We evaluate the proposed method on three popular recommendation datasets and show that it significantly outperforms the most accurate state-of-the-art static models. The experiments also demonstrate the greater robustness and stability of the proposed dynamic model in comparison with the most successful models to date. We also analyse the temporal behaviour of different preference components and their combinations and show that the dynamic behaviour of preference components is highly dependent on the preference dataset and domain. Therefore, the results also highlight the importance of modelling temporal effects but also underline the advantages of a component-based architecture that is better suited to capture domain-specific balances in the contributions of the aspects.

So is the Apple HomePod really worth the extra cost? MailOnline gave the smart speaker a test run to find out. Apple's HomePod stands at nearly 7 inches tall, which is slightly larger than the average smart speaker. It also feels heavier weighing in at 5.5lbs (2.5kg). But despite its size, it appears to blend into its surroundings.

Believe it or not, Google still isn't done with its slew of Assistant upgrades this week. The AI helper can now use Actions to perform specific intents within other Android apps for those times when voice alone won't cut it. If you need to see the parking pass you just booked, for instance, you can tap a button to go directly to that pass in the relevant Android app. The feature is rolling out over the next few weeks, and it's accompanied by a few other Assistant improvements that should make life a little easier. For one, Assistant can ask for your location in mid-conversation.

Over the last few years, artificial intelligence has helped push the envelope in terms of technological advancements in the financial industry. For example, consumers can use facial recognition to log in to financial apps and use voice commands to check their balances. This year, artificial intelligence is set to disrupt the industry even further. Dr. Jason Mars, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan and the CEO of Clinc, has first-hand knowledge of how artificial intelligence will evolve in 2018. Using deep neural networks, Clinc has developed a conversational AI platform for financial institutions that is like a more advanced "Siri for your bank account" or a "Google Now for your finances," but it supports the same natural language flow that you would have with a personal banker.

Chances are that you cannot scroll through your inbox each morning without running across at least one email trumpeting the impending arrival of artificial intelligence, blockchain and machine learning. They are just two of today's hot topics in a long list of new technologies that promise to radically transform the way business is done -- much as electricity, production lines, computers, and the internet transformed business and society in days past. As a long-time innovator for businesses, SAP is keenly focused on utilizing breakthrough technologies to help companies of all stripes deliver on their digital transformation goals. SAP has been researching the topic extensively, both from a pure technology standpoint and from the perspective of business value. Results from SAP's latest global survey of business leaders show two big hurdles to adoption.

MWC 2018 -- Telef--nica has launched its voice-activated "cognitive" assistant Aura in the six markets of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Spain and the UK after teaming up with tech giants including Facebook, Google and Microsoft on the new platform. First announced at last year's Mobile World Congress, Aura works much like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, allowing customers to request information and control devices through voice commands. Powered by artificial intelligence, the Aura technology will be available through apps that Telef--nica's customers can download onto their mobile devices. Unlike the digital assistants from Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Google, however, Aura has been designed around the communications services that Telef--nica provides to its customers. "It is a new customer relationship model based on cognitive intelligence and a one-stop shop for navigating through different channels," said Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete, Telef--nica's CEO, during a press conference earlier today.