Next frontier in smart voice assistants: your ear

The Bragi Dash "glows" green or blue, depending on whether it's charged and in use. A red hue means it's time to charge it back up. The tussle for supremacy between Amazon and Google to create the most useful voice assistant is getting louder. But while this battle is largely taking place in home speakers and phones, another player – IBM -- is carving out territory in the ear. At Barcelona's Mobile World Congress in February, Big Blue showed that it is getting down to business with voice, previewing applications that help a wide swath of professionals, from firefighters to family doctors, work smarter by using voice to tap into the Watson cognitive engine.