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Chinese electric car startup Byton made an ambitious debut at the Consumer Electronics Show last year when it unveiled its futuristic'Smart Intuitive Vehicle,' which boasts a nearly 50-inch dashboard display. And this year in Las Vegas, the firm is taking things up another notch. Byton kicked off CES 2019 by revealing the souped up interior of its M-Byte vehicle, complete with additional displays and an improved user interface, allowing users to interact with the vehicle through gesture and voice commands. All in all, M-Byte has five screens, each measuring at least the length of a standard tablet – including one positioned in the middle of the steering wheel. Byton also showed off its K-Byte concept electric sedan, which sports a digital grille and will launch with autonomous capabilities.

While Tesla has spent the past six months struggling to ramp up production of the Model 3 and fielding criticism over its Autopilot tech and safety protocols, one of its most intriguing wannabe rivals, Byton, has spent the first half of 2018 positioning itself to swipe Elon Musk's electric innovation crown. The coup d'EV started in January at CES, with the reveal of a screen-stuffed concept SUV. In February, Byton announced a partnership with star-studded Aurora to bring self-driving smarts to its vehicles. And today, at CES Asia in Shanghai, it unveiled a second concept car, a small sedan that can't help but make you think of a certain car rolling off the assembly line in Silicon Valley. Byton's new ride is the K-Byte, a three-box sedan with the front wheels pushed as far forward as possible.

There's no question as to who the real technology star is now: it's you. Your voice is what hundreds of companies are vying to attract, with thousands of new products calling out for you to talk to them. Voice-activated technology has erupted over the last 12 months since Amazon's Alexa was informally crowned breakout technology champion of the CES 2017 consumer tech show. Seemingly by stealth, Amazon had snuck Alexa into a dizzying array of products and everywhere you turned, there she was. Alexa was the name on everyone's lips – literally – and Amazon had achieved this near-ubiquitous name- recognition without even having a stand at the gargantuan annual gadget-fest in Las Vegas.

Byton, the new China-based company that unveiled a tech-centric all-electric SUV concept at the big tech trade show CES in January, is now tapping some outside experts to bring self-driving car technology into their future vehicles. Byton announced Monday that it has partnered with self-driving vehicle technology startup Aurora. The buzzy startup, led some of the best minds in self-driving cars, will work on bringing Level 4 autonomous vehicle capabilities into Byton vehicles. The two companies will conduct a pilot deployment of Aurora's L4 autonomous driving systems on Byton vehicles in the "next two years." The pilot will be in California, Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said.

Two of the most intriguing, young companies in the molting auto industry have joined forces to produce a sleek, screen-stuffed, self-driving SUV by 2020. And it'll be fully electric, too, with a 300-mile range that matches the most long-legged of Teslas. It's a bold ambition to be sure, but on paper, not such a crazy one. The car bits come from Byton, the newly launched Chinese automaker that showed its first prototype at CES last month. The ride comes stuffed with a 49-inch screen and a bevy of buzzy keywords: connected, shared, transformative, and above all, smart.

January has so far proven to be one of the busiest months for the transportation industry. CES in early January was flooded with car news, including the debut of a new $45,000 electric SUV by a Chinese Tesla competitor called Byton. Then, just days after CES wrapped, we had the Detroit auto show, where America's largest car-makers trot out their designs for the next year. WIRED transportation editor Alex Davies pays close attention to all of these announcements and developments. He joins us this week to discuss the latest in autonomous car tech, electric driving, and why China is the future of the auto industry.

Amazon's Alexa strategy is to be everywhere: ubiquitous, omnipresent, and all-knowing, like some AI god. In pursuit of that goal, the Seattle-based company certainly covered some ground at last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The extension of the Home Skills API to control microwaves and ovens adds to the more than 800 skills and more than 1,000 devices that Alexa can control in the home today. When it comes to cars, however, Alexa has made fewer inroads. That's why VentureBeat drew up this list of five ways Alexa will enter vehicles in 2018, as revealed at CES. Select Toyota vehicles, like 2018 models of the Camry and Sienna, as well as some Lexus vehicles, will be able to speak with Alexa this year.

In a dimly lit ballroom inside the MGM casino in Las Vegas earlier this month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was discussing a strange topic in front of a very eager crowd: Different species of flowers. That may seem out of place to anyone familiar with Nvidia, a company best known for graphics processors that power everything from gaming computers to driverless cars. But Huang was illustrating how his company's technology could use machine learning to identify and label more than 900 images of flowers in just a second. It was a fitting way to kick off this year's CES, the biggest tech show of the year. Many of the show's announcements and exhibitions centered on artificial intelligence (AI) and its role in smart homes, smart cars, and smart everything.

The Byton electric concept vehicle interior, with its 49-inch digital display, AI software, and high-tech cameras, was a highlight of the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. When a two-year-old Chinese startup unveiled the Byton--a high-end, artificially intelligent, fully electric sport utility vehicle that is 40 percent cheaper than a Tesla Model X--at last week's Consumer Electronics Show, it not only threw down the gauntlet in the race to develop smart electric cars. The company also signaled that Chinese manufacturing has entered a new phase. Just as China has become a global player in personal computers, solar panels, and integrated circuits to the point that the nation is among the world's largest producers, we expect China will become a major supplier in new sectors such as aerospace, smart cars, and robotics in the near future. Until now, the Chinese have been held back in these sectors in large part because of concerns over quality and safety.