From electric wheelchairs to hearing aids, assistive technology is key to enhancing the social participation of persons with disabilities. As image recognition technology continues to advance, mobile devices have the potential to help users with visual impairments overcome barriers in daily life. By working with users and listening to their feedback, Samsung has developed accessibility features to empower individuals with visual impairments for Galaxy devices.1,2 To mark this year's Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the company is putting a spotlight on the three features which have enabled many Galaxy users to live more freely. The idea behind Bixby Vision is a simple one. It's designed to give people the ability to gain more information about their surroundings by using a smartphone's camera.

Now that the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus are on sale, I thought we should take some time to get reacquainted with Samsung's ambitious virtual assistant. The sad truth is, the version of Bixby installed on the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus isn't that much better than what shipped on last year's Samsung flagships. Bixby does a lot of things, but some of Samsung's most fascinating work has gone into Bixby Vision, a suite of seemingly useful image recognition tools. Here's the rub, though: They're just about all powered by third-party services, and there's often little reason to use Bixby over any of those standalone apps. Vision is legitimately useful in that it provides a single place to access these functions, but it's hard to get excited when Samsung's main selling point comes down to convenience. Samsung does, however, deserve credit for dramatically improving Bixby Vision's overall speed.

Google Lens was announced at the Google I/O 2017 in May and has been slowly gaining steam since then. The app has the ability to identify songs and now can also recognize objects in a smartphone camera's field of vision. Google seems to have taken a page from Samsung's book -- the feature is pretty similar to the company's Bixby Vision, which was launched in August. Both applications use augmented reality algorithms to detect objects in a smartphone camera's range of vision. However, Samsung's execution of Bixby Vision has been flawed at best.

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.

Apple bought Lattice Data, a company that uses an artificial intelligence (AI) based interface engine for transforming unstructured "dark" data into structured and more usable information. TechCrunch reported Saturday, citing sources, that the tech giant reportedly paid $200 million for the acquisition. On being asked about the deal, Apple neither confirmed nor denied it. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," an Apple spokesperson told the publication. There is a massive amount of data produced globally every year – 4.4 Zetabytes in 2013 by a conservative estimate.

Last year's Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge were excellent phones, and so was the Galaxy Note 7... until it started bursting into flames. While some within Samsung were tasked with figuring out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again, others were trying to build a phone that would make people move on. The Note 7 won't disappear so easily from our collective memory, but I have to hand it to Samsung: The S8 siblings are impeccably built, thoughtfully designed devices. It's not hard to look at these smartphones as the first steps on a road to redemption, and after a week of testing, I can confidently say these are two of the best smartphones money can buy. I just wish its virtual assistant wasn't so half-baked. Text and photos don't do the S8 ($750) and S8 Plus ($850) justice. From their rounded edges to their precisely formed metal-and-glass bodies, they feel like smaller, sleeker versions of the Galaxy Note 7. That's a hell of a compliment, battery insanity notwithstanding -- the Note 7 was a beautiful device and I'm glad that DNA lives on. The S8 and S8 Plus's rounded Infinity displays -- which are 5.8 and 6.2 inches big, respectively -- only add to the phones' appeal. We'll dig into these curved screens more later, but people seemed to like them enough that it didn't make sense to have non-curved flagships anymore.