USA Today's Ed Baig tries out Samsung's new smartphone before it hits store shelves. NEW YORK-- Will the Note 7 battery fiasco choke sales of Samsung's latest smartphone? On redemption Friday, the day when consumers could start getting the company's first major phones since the twice recalled and ultimately discontinued Note 7 phablet, analysts expected heavy demand for the new Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S devices. Newly released research from SurveyMonkey and Creative Strategies found the Note 7 recalls had no impact on the interest in the Galaxy S8 and S for 53.7% of those surveyed. Among current Samsung smartphone users, 65.2% were unbothered by the Note 7 recall.

Google has partnered with Samsung, the world's largest Android smartphone maker, with a special version of Google Play Music, the two companies announced on Friday. Samsung previously launched its own streaming service, Milk which was subsequently shut down. The special partnership will also include integrations with Samsung's AI assistant Bixby when it launches, which will work like the Assistant integration on Google Home. SEE ALSO: Samsung Galaxy S8 is now available in the U.S. Samsung, a wildly successful hardware maker has long struggled with what role it plays in the software and services world. Samsung has long been dependent on Google for software services, on and off making competing products of its own like Milk and S Health, now Samsung Health (which replicates much of what Google Fit does).

Today, Google is shipping a major update for Google Home: multi-user support. Up to six people will be able to connect their account to Google's voice appliance, which will then be able to identify each person just by listening to them speak. The Google Home app jumped the gun on this launch earlier in the month, but now the feature is actually rolling out. After connecting their accounts, each user will have to go through the usual hotword training, reciting "OK Google" to the device three times. For future commands, Google Home will then call out the name of the person it detects before it gives a response. So if you ask "What's my day like?"

Google's voice-activated assistant can now recognize who's talking to it on Google's Home speaker. An update released Thursday enables Home's built-in assistant to learn the different voices of up to six people, although they can't all be talking to the internet-connected speaker at the same time. Distinguishing voices will allow Home to be more personal in some of its responses, depending on who triggers the assistant with the phrase, "OK Google" or "Hey Google." For instance, once Home is trained to recognize a user named Joe, the assistant will automatically be able to tell him what traffic is like on his commute, list events on his daily calendar or even play his favorite songs. Then another user named Jane could get similar information from Home, but customized for her.

In the future, it'd be nice to expect our smart home will just know when we're on our way home and prepare for our arrival. In the meantime, voice assistants from Google and Amazon let us control our devices without all of that fiddly button pressing. Mercedes Benz, which already pledged to bake Google's platform into its cars, is getting even more committed to our voice-controlled future. Today, the automaker is announcing that both Google Assistant and Alexa will work on all of its 2016 and 2017 models released in the US. All you need to get it working is an active Mercedes Me account and a subscription to mbrace, the Mercedes Benz smartphone platform.

Google Home received a major update to its voice recognition system on Thursday that lets owners set up the smart speaker to recognize multiple account holders. The software update means that up to six people can connect their Google account to one speaker and Google Assistant will be able to distinguish users by the sound of their voice. Amazon is said to be working on a similar feature for its Echo range of devices. The feature works by listening to how individual users say the phrases "Ok Google" and "Hey Google", and then runs the samples through a neural network that can detect certain voice characteristics and match vocal analyses in a matter of milliseconds. Google says the process happens "only on your device" and the samples aren't sent anywhere else.

Insurance executives believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will significantly transform their industry in the next three years, with insurers investing in AI to empower agents, brokers and employees to enhance the customer experience with automated personalized services, faster claims handling and individual risk-based underwriting processes, according to Accenture's Technology Vision for Insurance 2017. At the same time, however, the report found that insurers face challenges integrating AI into their existing technology, citing issues such as data quality, privacy and infrastructure compatibility. Titled "Technology for People," the report is based on the insights of a technology advisory board, interviews with industry technologists and a survey of more than 550 insurance executives across 31 countries. According to the report, three-quarters (75 percent) of insurance executives believe that AI will either significantly alter or completely transform the overall insurance industry in the next three years. One-third (32 percent) believe that their own company will be "completely transformed" by AI within that timeframe, and an additional 39 percent believe that AI will "significantly change" their company.

A few changes are afoot at Engadget, Elon Musk has plans for brain-machine interfaces in a few years, and HTC made a phone that is rumored to be squeezable. Meanwhile, a high-end, WiFi-connected juicer with mountains of funding is also feeling the squeeze. Changes aheadWe're learning from our past to inform our future. It's not the weekend yet, but we have a letter from the new editor-in-chief, Christopher Trout walking down memory lane and laying out what you can expect from Engadget in the future. That's one way to sell more camerasGoPro's Fusion spherical camera is six GoPros in one Facebook, isn't the only one with a new 360-degree camera, as GoPro is announcing its 5.2K VR-capable Fusion camera.

If you want to know how to build great data science-enabled product, you needn't look beyond LinkedIn, now Microsoft-owned. The Mountain View headquartered professional networking company has over 433 million members across 200 countries, allowing data scientists access to structured datasets that spawned cutting-edge data-driven products, most notably "People You May Know"; "Social Graph Visualizations"; " Matching" and "Collaborative Filtering" that drove the company to success. According to Mandar Parikh, VP Product & Engineering, Entytle Inc, "Linkedin is one of the early adopters of data science and is at the forefront of modern day data science. It was one of the first companies to put together a strong data science team. In fact, LinkedIn graph search and recruiter product has got data science behind," he said.

OK Google, how far is it from LA to San Francisco?