Google will be announcing its new pair of Pixel 2 smartphones Wednesday alongside other new products. One of them is the smaller Google Home Mini, which popped up prematurely on Walmart's website Tuesday morning. The listing also revealed the Google Home Mini release date. Walmart listed that the Google Home Mini will arrive on Oct. 19, which is just two weeks after Google's official unveiling tomorrow. As IBT previously reported earlier this month, the smaller smart speaker will cost $49.

Whenever we hire any personal assistant, we look forward to many qualities and skills. We watch the person who is familiar with the business, having analytical skills and also give some suggestion. Could this be possible through a virtual entity? Though the scenario seems unreal. It is going to be reality soon with an application having the functionality of a digital assistant with artificial intelligence.

A few years ago, experts were trumpeting that the future is mobile, and they weren't wrong. Some of the world's most successful new apps and business models are mobile-based -- just look at Uber, Instagram and Snapchat. Now, our machines and devices are beginning to understand us on an even deeper level. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are being used to improve user experience and transform the way that we interact with technology. The aim is to simplify processes using complex assistive technologies and seamlessly integrate them into our lives.

Dictation within Windows has lived in the shadows for years. Finally, with Windows 10 and the Fall Creators Update, dictating text is almost as easy as talking to Siri, Cortana, or Google. Within Windows 10, you can turn on dictation with just a keystroke. I wrote this whole article with just my voice. Dictation has lived within Windows for years, though it's been confined to the Control Panel, where users had to set up and configure dictation capabilities manually before they could actually use it in the real world.

The whole point of Amazon's Alexa is to talk, rather than type, to a virtual assistant. When you've grown tired of ordering Domino's pizzas and asking what the weather is like, however, the company hopes you'll want to talk to another human being. Following the US, it's now possible to call and message Alexa users from the UK, Germany and Austria. It works on the company's fast-growing range of Echo and Echo Dot speakers, as well as the Alexa app for iOS and Android. The screen-equipped Echo Show will also support basic video calling when it arrives in Britain next month.

You'd think having dominated search and email, created Chrome and YouTube, plus a self-driving car project, a handful of save-the-world enterprises, and the greatest advertising business in the history of the universe would be enough to keep Google busy. You certainly wouldn't think the folks in Mountain View would suddenly feel the urge to get into the smartphone game, a remarkably mature market where nobody but Samsung and Apple makes any money, and where Google's already ubiquitous thanks to Android. And yet, tomorrow, Google will reportedly launch the next generation of its smartphone with the Pixel 2 and the Pixel 2 XL. At the same time, the company will reportedly introduce a new Chrome OS-based laptop called the Pixelbook, a small smart speaker called the Google Home Mini, and new hardware for the Daydream VR platform. The announcements come on the heels of Google's $1.1 billion acqui-hire of 2,000 HTC engineers, who will help Google make more hardware, more quickly.

Are you ready for a self-driving car? Did you ask Google, Siri or Amazon Alexa for anything today? Was your last trade a winner? These questions point to a reality in today's world. Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay.

The concepts fueling the development of artificial-intelligence applications are hardly new. Attempts to understand how the brain thinks--how decisions are made, how it saves and processes memories, and how it leverages connected learning systems--have been perplexing humans since before the times of the classic philosophers. Soon after brilliant English mathematician Alan Turing published his groundbreaking 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", the academic discipline aimed toward one day surpassing human intelligence was born. The term artificial intelligence (AI) itself was coined by Boston-born computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956, as he and his peers established research labs at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Stanford. The current wave of AI startups owes much to the decades of research and experimentation developed by these teams and those that followed.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is usually imagined as a physical robot, but that's a common misconception. AI lives inside different devices such as the Amazon Echo, the iPhone, smartwatches, and even mirrors. People usually use this type of technology in their personal lives to complete simple tasks, such as ordering food, setting reminders, and sending messages. But AI is just as useful in the business world. In the workplace, AI can help employees focus on deep work and not be distracted by menial tasks (e.g. According to McKinsey & Company, workers spend about 28 percent of their workweek managing email.

Google's Pixel 2 handsets have been leaked ahead if its unveiling on October 4th. Evan Blass, renowned for leaking handsets from almost every manufacturer ahead of their launch, posted the images to his Twitter account today. Two versions of the handset will be launched, a Pixel and a Pixel XL, and the images reveal a new homescreen Google has developed for Android phones. Manufactured by HTC and LG, respectively, the handset are codenamed Walleye and Taimen, and Blass says according to a person familiar with Google's release plans, they will be released on October 19 for Pixel 2 and November 15 for Pixel 2 XL, both preceded by preorder periods. Droid Life recently also claimed to have images of the new handset, alongside a new mini wireless speaker, and images of an updated Daydream VR headset.