It's here: native support for Google Assistant officially started rolling out to Android phones running Marshmallow or Nougat on Thursday. As Engadget noted earlier in the week, Google's conversational digital assistant no longer needs a Pixel phone or the Allo app to work, but you may need to check your phone's specs before you get access. Users will need to be running Android M or N on a phone with Google Play services and at least 1.5GB of RAM and a 720p screen to get Assistant's new features. The rollout will also be staggered so that English language users in the US will see it show up first, followed by another wave of rollouts to Canadians and Australians. German users will also get the service in their native tongue, but other languages aren't expected until "the coming year."

Three heads are better than one. This is perhaps what electronics company Sony and LG and instant messaging app Line are thinking now that they have partnered together to develop a smart speaker that would rival Amazon Echo and Google Home and an AI assistant that would be worthy competitor for Alexa, Apple's Siri and Google Assistant. Leading this partnership is the popular chat app who is now ready to foray into the world of artificial intelligence. Line has a strong following in Asian countries, especially in Japan and South Korea. But it needs support to venture into this new market and realize its goal of launching its own intelligent assistant and smart speaker.

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Beginning today, Google Assistant is opening up to new devices around the world. Both Nougat and Marshmallow-powered phones are gaining access to the artificial intelligence platform. Google is making the feature live in select countries to start, so you may not get to use Google Assistant for a couple of days, weeks, and or even months. The first set of people get it are English-speaking users in the United States. After that, English-speaking users in Australia will be next.

If you use a computer, you've probably seen that little "Intel Inside" sticker on it somewhere, letting you know that your Facebook posts and cat videos are happening due to Intel's dominance in the computer chip business. But there's another computer chip maker, Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, that we don't hear about very much, although that may be about to change. Here at DT, Matt Smith has been putting AMD's new Ryzen 7 1800X chip through its paces, and he's here to report that the CPU has what it takes to compete against Intel, and at a price that puts it in reach of most people who like to build their own computer systems. The Ryzen 7 packs eight cores against the 10 in Intel's top Core i7 model, and while it isn't quite as fast as Intel's fastest chip, it's still pretty damn fast and at a price far below Intel's premium offerings. Is it a viable non-Intel option for computer builders and OEMs to drop into their machines?

LG's latest G6 flagship may have become the first non-Pixel phone to have Google's new Assistant feature, but the search giant is focused on bringing its new personal assistant to as many other smartphones as humanly possible. Keeping true to its promise, the Mountain View firm just started rolling out Assistant to smartphones running Android 7.0 Nougat and Android 6.0 Marshmallow versions. With Assistant, you just long press on the Home button or say "Ok Google" to get started. The advanced feature leverages Google's knowledge graph, artificial intelligence and machine learning to better understand context of your questions. Google's conversational artificial intelligence helper debuted at Google I/O in March 2016 on its Pixel smartphones, the Amazon Echo-like Home speaker, in the cross-platform Allo messaging app and as a built-in feature of the latest version of the Android Wear platform.

Artificial intelligence startup Ozlo thinks it has a solution for situations where virtual assistants fail in their responses: Getting the bots to ask questions back. Ozlo is launching a trio of software packages for other companies to enhance the virtual assistants they build. They're aimed at making those assistants more sophisticated, including getting them to ask clarifying questions when they don't understand a user request. Current virtual assistants, meaning conversational apps and bots like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, "have this problem with being very brittle," Ozlo CEO Charles Jolley told Recode. He's referring to those moments when Siri says, "I didn't quite get that," or where Google Assistant says, "Sorry, I don't know how to do that yet," without addressing what part of the question the virtual assistants don't understand.

Line Corp., owner of Japan's most popular messaging service, is getting into the artificial intelligence market in a big way by outlining an ambitious plan that pits it against the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon. According to a report in Bloomberg News, Line Corp. is gearing up to launch a suite of AI software tools that will enable a digital assistant that speaks in Japanese and Korean. The assistant will be able to converse with users and provide weather and news via a dedicated smartphone app or a speaker that sits on the table and is called Wave, similar to Amazon's Echo. Line Corp., which unveiled the strategy during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, this week, said both the app and the speaker will come to the market between April and June. While Line faces a lot of competition, the company thinks it can stand out from the pack because of its local knowledge about the markets in which it is operating, including South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia.

The past decade has witnessed tremendous influx of technology across all aspects of business operations. Organizations are increasingly turning to automation, artificial intelligence and robotics to bring about a transformation in their revenue generation capability, reduction in costs and increase in efficiency. Indian banking leaders like ICICI and HDFC have piloted using humanoids/robots to bring about operational efficiency by intelligently automating many of the backend processes and customer facing areas. On a similar note, global banks like Mizuho and Sberbank use virtual assistants to enhance customer experience. Technological advances are increasingly being viewed as game changers in the ever evolving business landscape.

It's not a stretch to say we'll all be speaking to AI-powered digital assistants in the future. But who will build the assistants we use the most? Till now that battle has been waged by tech giants in e-commerce, search and mobile hardware, through Amazon's Alexa, Google Now and Apple's Siri. Now a popular chat app in Asia is throwing its hat into the ring. LINE, the messaging app owned by South Korea's Naver and with 700 million registered users, wants to take a step beyond smartphones and towards screen-less technology, the company's chief executive, Takeshi Idezawa said at Mobile World Congress (MWC) on Wednesday, with its own digital assistant powered by machine learning. Moving past the smartphone screen is a wise strategy for any tech company these days, even those who were born on mobile.