The Apple Watch can help users stay active, track their health data and can boost workouts with the watchOS 4 update. Apple launched the Apple Watch Series 3 and the watchOS 4 update in September 2015. The Series 3 is priced at $329 for the standard Wi-Fi version and $399 for the LTE cellular model. The wearable device includes a dual-core processor, a faster Siri, a heart rate sensor and is about the same size as the Series 2. While Apple doesn't sell the Series 2 anymore, the company still sells the original Apple Watch for $249. The original Apple Watch also supports watchOS 4. The Workout app is also another feature that can boost users' exercise sessions.

Early recognition of cardiac arrest is vitally important as the chance of survival decreases about 10 percent with each minute. In Denmark AI assistant Corti is listening in to phone calls to emergency services to help detect signs of a heart attack. With Corti implemented, the dispatcher gets a digital assistant that listens in on the conversation and helps to look for important signals in both verbal communication, as well as tone of voice and breathing patterns, while also considering other metadata. All the data provided during the emergency call is automatically analyzed by Corti and then compared to the millions of emergency calls – which Corti has already analysed –to find important patterns. As Corti's understanding of the incident increases, the assistant will try to predict the criticality of the patient's situation based on symptom descriptions and the signals gathered from voice and audio.

It's a new year, and I bet you picked up a few shiny tech gadgets to play with over the holidays. But while your Google Home pods, face ID-enabled iPhones, wearable fitness trackers, 3D printers, and the like might be fun and games now, there's serious power behind those tools – power that enhances the performance of your content marketing efforts, makes them easier to produce, and makes them more enticing to your audiences. If you read our recent 2018 Content Marketing Predictions e-book, you may have noticed how many experts anticipate tech-enhanced experiences to dominate the content landscape. For example, HubSpot's Scott Brinker predicts chatbots and voice interfaces will experience explosive growth. Autodesk's Dusty DiMercurio sees an impending rise in augmented reality content at live events; and Chief Content Officer's Clare McDermott is all but ready to bow down to the AI overlords and embrace a more automated future. These expectations of greater tech dependence are likely well founded.

Brits can now ask their iThings to give them a brief update on what's happening in the world with the command: "Hey Siri, give me the news." Siri doesn't actually read the news, though, and instead will automatically play the latest podcast from a trusted source of your choice. I was treated to a 2-minute bulletin from BBC News when I said the magic words to Siri this morning, which also offered Sky News and LBC up as alternative sources. As Apple prepares Siri for life inside its HomePod smart speaker, it first added the news briefing feature to the beta version of iOS 11.2.5 -- limiting it to the States at that point, too, where The Washington Post, Fox News, NPR or CNN provide the updates. In a matter of weeks, however, it's now graduated out of beta to become a standard Siri feature in iOS 11, whilst rolling out to new territories.

Black Mirror might be intent on warning us about the dangers, but artificial intelligence does indeed appear to be taking over our lives. Most of us seem pretty happy about it though, with voice technology increasingly growing in popularity. According to Kantar Worldpanel, 2.7m households in the UK currently own an Amazon Echo or Google Home device. Across the pond, usage is also on the up, with 55% of US households predicted to own one of these devices by 2020. So, what are the opportunities for brands and consumers alike?

Microsoft researchers have created a technology that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to read a document and answer questions about it about as well as a human. "It's a major milestone in the push to have search engines such as Bing and intelligent assistants such as Cortana interact with people and provide information in more natural ways, much like people communicate with each other," Allison Linn, senior writer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. The team at Microsoft Research Asia reached the human parity milestone using the "Stanford Question Answering Dataset", known among researchers as "SQuAD". It's a machine reading comprehension dataset that is made up of questions about a set of Wikipedia articles. According to the SQuAD leaderboard, Microsoft submitted a model that reached the score of 82.650 on the exact match portion.

For the fourth consecutive year, LG Electronics has nabbed an Official CES Best TV Product Award – this time for its new LG AI OLED TV (model C8). The company won over 90 awards at CES 2018, in addition to numerous best-of-show honours for the LG InstaView ThinQ Refrigerator and LG 4K UHD Projector. AT CES 2018, the company unveiled its suite of smart home appliances connected with LG ThinQ AI. It also debuted its first TVs with Google Assistant built in, notably the LG SIGNATURE AI OLED TV W8 with ThinQ – which won over ten CES awards. LG's InstaView ThinQ Refrigerator notched the second most award wins, boasting Amazon Alexa and a suite of other smart features (e.g. As previously reported, the company also used CES to unveil its new α (Alpha) 9 intelligent processor, which further amps up the performance of its flagship LG AI OLED TV range.

If you know anything about home design, I'm guessing you know the name Kohler. Their kitchen and bath collections are some of the most visually stunning out there, and at CES 2018 they unveiled a whole new facet to their faucets (and showers and toilets and baths). Kohler Konnect marks the brand's foray into the smart home world, and they're making a big splash with a lineup of connected bath and kitchen products. Bathroom humor aside, Kohler is a strong contender for anyone who wants to enjoy all the luxuries of design and technology in new and innovative ways. With Kohler Konnect and a lineup of seven new connected bathroom and kitchen products, your hands-free smart technology reaches into new areas of your home.

With its acquisition of Next IT, Verint signals that Intelligent Assistance technologies most definitely fit into the customer care mainstream. Next IT, a Spokane-based company, was founded in 2002 and was, until yesterday, one of a small cadre IA "pure plays," providing hardware, software and services that enable brands to build enterprise-grade, conversational virtual agents and digital assistants. Among its showcase icons are SGT STAR (for the U.S. Army) and Jenn for Alaska Airlines and dozens of others. The purchase price starts at $30 million in cash at the time of completion, with performance-based additions that could make the total value of the deal $51 million, according to a report in Newsday. From Opus Research's perspective, the transaction is a "win-win" for both firms.

These 8K televisions offer four times the resolution of 4K TVs and 16 times the resolution of regular HD sets. They promise to offer ultrasharp images on jumbo-sized sets. Samsung plans to use AI to solve the problem. The electronics giant says it can take 4K, 1080p, and even 720p videos and upscale them using its AI technologies so they appear sharp and detailed on its 8K sets. The image below, according to Samsung, shows how one such technology, which it calls Edge Enhancement, can make letters, in particular, appear sharper.