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.

It could be the fault of Google Chromecast or the Google Home smart speaker. Users and experts alike have indicated the devices are causing trouble for wireless routers. A number of complaints have started to crop up on product pages and online forums in recent months suggesting that the introduction of internet-connected Google products into the home have caused disruptions including the internet connection dropping out completely. The first round of complaints focused on the Google Home Max--the company's high-end speaker that has its Google Assistant built in--and how it interacted with routers from TP-Link, the world's top provider of wireless networking devices. TP-Link quickly identified the issue, which stemmed from how the Google device would MDNS packets, which are used to identify individual internet-connected devices on the same network.

Monika Chalk of the Amazon Alexa team demonstrates an array of devices infused the company's artificial intelligence in a Roadshow trailer parked at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, January 10, 2018. Two days into the annual technology fest that is CES and one of the biggest stories of this year's show is the battle between Google and Amazon for the smart home. So far, Amazon is winning. If there ever was an example of how first-mover advantage can change a market, it's Amazon's Alexa. The digital assistant has been popping up everywhere this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual tech fest that tries to set the agenda for gadget makers everywhere.

From Amazon's Alexa on more than 10 million countertops and Siri in every iPhone to GM implementing IBM's Watson into OnStar and Tesla's autopilot using cloud-based learning, Artificial Intelligence, in various forms, is reaching a point of cultural ubiquity. This tipping point has provoked a range of responses from thought-leaders and visionaries: Elon Musk warned of the existential risk of AI, and Richard Branson posited that the extreme wealth generated by the technology should be used to fund a Universal Basic Income. Less discussed at this point, however, has been how everyday consumers conceptualize, feel about, and use AI. To fill this gap in the current conversation, The Integer Group conducted a four-phase research study into consumer adoption of, and attitudes toward, AI. The research included a quantitative survey of more than 3,500 households and 15 in-home ethnographies with consumers in the U.S.

Amazon wants to put a camera and microphone in your bedroom with the UK launch of its latest Echo home device. The camera on the £119.99 ($129) Echo Spot, which doubles up as a'smart alarm', will probably be facing directly at the user's bed. The device, which is already available in the US has such sophisticated microphones it can hear people talking from across the room - even if music is playing. However, there remain privacy concerns over using such a device in the home. Amazon devices have previously activated when they're not wanted meaning this small device could turn into a potential spy.

Last year was a big year for Alexa. First, Amazon released updated versions of its popular Echo speakers and then brought its smart assistant to screens with the launch of the Echo Show and the Echo Spot. However, like many Amazon products, they often take their time to travel across the Atlantic. The Echo Show took around five months to launch in the UK and we've been waiting since September for its smaller sibling to make its debut. Today, Amazon announced that its smart alarm clock will cost £120 and is now available to pre-order. Actually, calling the Echo Spot a smart alarm clock is doing it a disservice.