We first heard about Harman Kardon's smart speaker earlier this month, but haven't gotten a chance to try it out or even see what it looks like in person. The Cortana-powered Echo rival made an oh-so-brief appearance here at Microsoft's keynote for Computex 2017. Even though we still couldn't physically touch it, we were at least able to take some (very few) close-up pictures of the device. We also caught a fleeting look at an upcoming HP Cortana speaker that looked sort of like a white Echo Dot, but that was only a picture on a slideshow -- the device itself was nowhere to be found at the event. We'll surely hear more about it soon enough, though.

The first major event at Computex Taipei 2017 was the Powering The AI Revolution keynote by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. Although the keynote was heavy on artificial intelligence technologies like NVIDIA Isaac and NVIDIA Volta, Jensen also announced other technologies like GeForce GTX with Max-Q Design. In this 90 minute long keynote, Jensen reveals the future of artificial intelligence and robotics. In that vision, the GPU is taking over from the CPU in delivering the petaflops of computing power required to deliver artificial intelligence. He reveals the new NVIDIA technologies that will power the next-generation AI applications – the new NVIDIA Tesla V100, which is the largest GPU ever made, and the NVIDIA HGX server that hosts eight of these GPUs to deliver almost 1 petaflops of compute performance in a single chassis!

We're pretty much half way through the year, which means it's Computex time. As usual, you'll find a handful of us running around the Taipei show floors next week, where we'll be getting our hands dirty with the latest PC products and components. Last year was relatively fruitful thanks to the VR explosion. Several PC brands rolled out high-end GPUs or affordable ones capable of running VR. Even Intel surprised its hardcore users with its first-ever 10-core desktop CPU.