With Harman International by its side, Samsung is preparing to enter the smart speaker market by creating a device that's sporting a more advanced artificial intelligence technology. The smart speaker Samsung is launching could even be running on an AI platform that's better than Amazon's Alexa and Google's Google Assistant. Last Friday, Harman International CEO Dinesh Paliwal spoke with The Korea Herald after a private meeting with Samsung Electronics President and CEO Yoon Boo-keun and other distributors and business partners. Though the half-hour meeting was a closed-door event, Paliwal divulged to the publication that among the topics they discussed at the gathering was the ongoing collaboration between the two companies as they work on Samsung's smart speaker. Paliwal also admitted that the two firms will be doing extensive research and development for the AI device.

New details about Apple's iPhone 8 surfaced over the weekend, and they appear to suggest that the device could come with a new feature designed to activate Siri in the absence of the physical Home button. As per earlier reports, iPhone 8 is going to launch sans a physical Home button due to its all-screen design. Now because the device is unlikely to sport a physical key on its front, consumers are left with no other option than to activate Apple's voice assistant using the "Hey Siri" voice command. For those who do not like resorting to the voice command to wake Siri, Apple could be preparing a new alternative. This feature will reportedly enable users to activate Siri by holding down the Sleep/Wake button of the handset.

Known for driving the hearables tech space into a new phase, startup Bragi has announced their latest venture with online shopping giant Amazon. With the objective to make the Dash series (The Dash, The Dash Pro) Alexa-compatible, this collaboration will mark the first for intelligent personal assistant Alexa. Designed for convenience, the Amazon Alexa is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real time information, such as news. Founded in 2013, Munich-based Bragi have cornered the hearable market with their innovative technology. They gained popularity during its Kickstarter campaign, where 15,998 backers contributed over $3.3 million (USD).

Apple could be about to give Siri a starring role on the new iPhone. The company may be gearing up to give the voice assistant its own button that can be easily accessed at any time, according to new leaks. That's in addition to the new powers it will get in iOS 11 – due for release at the same time as the iPhone – which were revealed earlier this summer. With that new software, Siri will be able to learn more about people and then make that same information on all Siri-enabled devices. And it will be given new powers, including the ability to help you find things to read in Apple News or to nag you into exercising on your Apple Watch.

Science fiction has an uncanny ability to predict the future of technology, from Star Trek's Padd, essentially an iPad, to the Jetsons' robot vacuum, basically a Roomba. Now that the voice assistant is here, that's another checklist off the sci-fi predictor, but while our Alexas, Siris, Cortanas and Google Assistants are pretty basic right now, if sci-fi continues its great prelude to the future, what will the computers of the future really be like? According to Amazon's head of devices, Dave Limp, the next phase in computing is less about the physical thing and more about how and where you access it. He says: "We think of it as ambient computing, which is computer access that's less dedicated personally to you but more ubiquitous. "Our vision is to create that Star Trek computer and work backwards from that.

If you are a fan of Siri, then good news: Apple's voice assistant looks like it will be getting a promotion in the near future, thanks to the combination of iOS 11 and the "D22" iPhone (the leaked model thought to be the forthcoming "iPhone Pro, 8 or X"). If you're not a fan of Siri, well, look away now – some of this isn't pretty. For the first time, Siri will sync across devices, letting details it has picked up from your phone affect how it answers on your iPad or computer. The service is also seeing a slight refocus: Siri isn't just a voice assistant anymore, since "Siri" will also be responsible for suggesting topics in Apple News based on your web browsing, or for suggesting a calendar event if you make a booking online. It'll also be able to do translations for the first time, from English (only) to five languages including French and Chinese.

Lenovo has announced a range of new smart devices at the IFA conference in Berlin today. The new devices include a mixed reality headset, as well as a Home Assistant pack which transforms your tablet into a smart assistant. As well as the new smart devices, Lenovo also announced the launch of the moto x4 – a smartphone integrated with Amazon Alexa. Lenovo has announced a range of new smart devices at the IFA conference in Berlin today. One of Lenovo's new products is the Yoga 920 laptop, which comes with Pen, Voice and Biometrics.

We're pleased to welcome Dr. Matthew Berryman, Managing Director of Across the Cloud, and hear about "Real time flood mapping with social media bots, IoT and image recognition." PetaBencana brings together local flood information and mobile mapping for Jakarta, Bandung and Surabaya, Indonesia - allowing millions of citizens to share real-time flood information. The platform has recently added AWS Rekognition to assist emergency operators make more informed decision on flood information shared by citizens.

The concept of virtual assistance has been in consumers' mind for more than half a century, first introduced through Sci-Fi movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) featuring virtual assistant HAL and infamous quote "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." Portrayed as a must-have feature by the consumer tech industry, our research at Ovum shows that digital assistants, in fact, fall short of consumer expectations and can't do what they want. A survey conducted by Ovum in the UK and the US in May 2017 revealed that more than 50 percent of consumers don't find digital assistants useful (see Figure 1). The digital assistant population will equal today's human population in 2021. Instead, Google Assistant will dominate the native (i.e.

Connected technologies are invading our lives more and more fully with each passing day. We may not even notice how natural it's become to ask Siri or Alexa or Google to interpret more of our human experience, and expect our cars to respond to the rules of the road fast enough to keep our hides intact. Some of us are still bothered by technologies such as public cameras feeding images to facial recognition software, but plenty aren't. At this point, it's easy to laugh at a lot of AI failures because on balance they're mostly funny (just forget about the potential for fatal outcomes). Well, we think as the machines march on, and as malware continues to evolve, that will shift.