Samsung is expected to replace its S-Voice functionality with an artificially intelligent Bixby voice assistant in its upcoming S8 device. But, how would Bixby fare in comparison with Google Assistant -- the U.S. tech giant's Artificial Intelligence enabled voice assistant? "Samsung and Google will have to continue to maintain their strategic partnership to nurture the AI and the market for the emerging technology," Lee Kyeong-Tae, corporate strategy planning vice-president, Samsung Electronics told The Investor on Tuesday. Samsung has in the past come out with devices having two voice assistants, S-Voice and Google Voice. But this time, the company seems to have different plans for Bixby.

Virtually every major smartphone vendor, from Apple to Samsung to LG to Huawei, is expected to release devices featuring artificial intelligence this year. Industry sources tell DigiTimes that virtual assistants will once again play a large role in the mobile industry in 2017, and that significant upgrades are on the way. According to DigiTimes' sources, Apple is working on an "enhanced" version of its Siri virtual assistant for its next generation of iPhone devices. The report doesn't specify whether or not this new Siri will appear on the iPhone 8, but with all the talk of the sweeping changes and additional features Apple is planning to bring to the iPhone for its 10th anniversary, a more advanced Siri would make sense. The report also points to Apple's acquisition of machine learning and AI startup Turi last August, which it says will allow the company to "further strengthen the functionality, as well as the market share" of Siri, which is now competing with the likes of Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant.

When Apple removed the traditional headphone socket from its latest iPhone, part of the rationale was that wireless headphones were now coming into the mainstream. And Apple had its own player in this field, its AirPods. But then there was an unexpected delay in their launch, raising fears over technical issues. Now they're finally here, are they worth the £159 price tag? The AirPods are not the first wireless earbuds on the market, but until the start of 2016 they all had a cable joining the right and left earbud.

Apple released Tuesday the iOS 10.3 Beta 1 for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The Beta 1 is a Developer Beta and not a Public Beta, which means that its availability would be restricted to iOS developers for now. Still, the iOS 10.3 Beta 1 holds clues to features that will be included in the final version of iOS 10.3 when it releases as official software update to all eligible iPhone, iPad and iPod models. Here are five features you can expect in iOS 10.3: While Apple introduced the AirPods back in September, the wireless earphones were just recently made available to customers.

At CES 2017, plenty of car makers were showing off the latest tech. One of the most interesting developments is that popular digital assistants are making their way onto infotainment systems, with Nissan and BMW demonstrating Cortana. Cortana will be familiar to Windows users as it's built into Windows 10 as well as Windows phones. Although there's no firm date yet when you'll be able to buy a car with Cortana, both Nissan and BMW unveiled their plans at CES to bring the digital assistant to some models in their ranges. Nissan's demo showed the most advanced integration, with Cortana able to tailor preferences and settings based on who's driving, which suggests user profiles will be involved.

If your Google Home device is not responding to your commands, then it's probably due to a dirty mic. Tech junkie and web developer Robby Payne shared his experience this week and advised other users who may encounter the same problem to try this nifty trick in making the Google Assistant-powered speaker receptive again. In Payne's story, which he shared on Chrome Unboxed, his Google Home device stopped responding to his questions and commands one day. The lights atop the speaker would spin upon hearing his daughter's questions, but the device would go out and not provide any response. Despite resetting the AI speaker, it still remained to be unresponsive.

It may sound like YouTube has been possessed, but the demonic sounds coming from the clip below are voice commands to access a smartphone's virtual assistant. Researchers have found an attack that uses'hidden voice commands' embedded within clips that lets hackers prompt the assistant to perform a number of tasks. This attack lets hackers make phone calls, use Venmo to transfer money or worse, download malware giving cyberthieves complete control of the handset. Researchers have found an attack that uses'hidden voice commands' embedded within YouTube videos that lets hackers prompt the assistant to perform a number of tasks. They placed an Android 10ft away from the speaker and the'demonic sounds' said'OK Google' Researchers found that hackers are able to embed'hidden voice commands' in YouTube clips to control a smartphones virtual assistant.

We consider the problem of segmenting a large population of customers into non-overlapping groups with similar preferences, using diverse preference observations such as purchases, ratings, clicks, etc. over subsets of items. We focus on the setting where the universe of items is large (ranging from thousands to millions) and unstructured (lacking well-defined attributes) and each customer provides observations for only a few items. These data characteristics limit the applicability of existing techniques in marketing and machine learning. To overcome these limitations, we propose a model-based projection technique, which transforms the diverse set of observations into a more comparable scale and deals with missing data by projecting the transformed data onto a low-dimensional space. We then cluster the projected data to obtain the customer segments. Theoretically, we derive precise necessary and sufficient conditions that guarantee asymptotic recovery of the true customer segments. Empirically, we demonstrate the speed and performance of our method in two real-world case studies: (a) 84% improvement in the accuracy of new movie recommendations on the MovieLens data set and (b) 6% improvement in the performance of similar item recommendations algorithm on an offline dataset at eBay. We show that our method outperforms standard latent-class and demographic-based techniques.

Amazon has upgraded its smart assistant - and answered the prayers of Star Trek fans around the world. Traditionally, owners of Amazon's Echo speakers can simply say'Alexa' to trigger it. Now, the firm has added a new feature letting them say'computer' instead, in a nod to the sci fi series. Users can now choose between Alexa, Echo, Amazon and Computer to wake up their smart speaker - letting the smart assistant operate in the same way as Star Trek's computers. Open the left navigation panel, and then select Settings.

A charitable foundation backed by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife said Monday it has bought a Canadian artificial intelligence startup as part of a mission to eradicate disease. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative did not disclose financial terms of the deal to acquire Toronto-based Meta, which uses AI to quickly read and comprehend scientific papers and then provide insights to researchers. Meta capabilities will be unified in a tool made available for free to scientists. Meta artificial intelligence can analyze insights across millions of papers, finding connections and patterns at scales and speeds impossible for humans to match unassisted. In the field of biomedicine alone, thousands of research papers are published daily.