• Amazon's Alexa Can Now Send SMS Messages To Phones
    Voice devices in the home continue to evolve and expand with new capabilities being added continually. Now Amazon has enabled its Alexa digital voice assistant to send text messages through its Echo devices. The catch is that the messages only work through Android phones, once the messaging capability is activated in the Alexa app in the phone.
  • Moving Things Vs. People In Self-Driving Vehicles
    The technology for self-driving vehicles is moving right along, but the question of who or what will ride inside such vehicles is still to be determined. The recent announcement that Waymo is buying thousands of self-driving minivans for a ride hailing service is but one example of autonomous vehicles carrying people. Apple also recently increased its self-driving California test fleet to 27 cars. However, there are other programs where self-driving vehicles are being designed to carry things rather than people.
  • Virtual Reality Fading For Developers While AR Holds Steady
    Virtual reality has long been viewed as a big deal for gaming, but that may be changing, essentially in favor of augmented reality. The number of games released on VR headsets is declining while the number coming out on AR headsets is remaining steady, according to a new study While 19% of developers said their current game will release on VR headsets, only 17% said their next one would, according to the sixth annual study, comprising a survey of 4,000 game developers conducted by the Game Developers Conference.
  • Apple Takes On The Smart Speaker World
    Apple is finally joining the smart speaker race with its HomePod, with online ordering now underway. While Amazon and Google have spent time gathering up massive market share of the smart speaker market, Apple has been working on creating a first-rate sound experience. "HomePod is a magical new music experience from Apple," stated Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing. "It brings advanced audio technologies lik
  • Media, Entertainment Challenged Finding AI Talent
    In one form or another, artificial intelligence is popping up in many areas and aspects of business these days. With all this AI, some industries are challenged in finding qualified staff to lead their AI efforts. The most challenged industry is media and entertainment, based on a new study.
  • Putting The Connections In Connected Cars
    At CES a couple weeks back, plenty of connected car concepts were on display. At the mega-Samsung booth, the tech vendor, with an assist from Harman, which it bought for $8 billion a while ago, a concept car was shown with the dashboard of the future, including a screen that uses cameras to replace all the rear-view mirrors. I recently caught up with an executive at the company in Israel that provides the complex technological plumbing behind all of that.
  • The IoT Numbers: Millions To Billions To Trillion
    Some of the numbers relating to the Internet of Things boggle the mind. Some of the smaller numbers are in the millions. For example, 56 million smart speakers will be shipped globally this year, according to a recent forecast form Canalys.
  • Amazon Shoppers Greeted By Store Full Of Cameras
    Cameras everywhere. That's one of the promises of the Amazon Go store opening to the public today after more than a year of testing with Amazon employees. The idea is that consumers use their phones to identify themselves as they enter the store, pick up items as they shop and when done, then walk out the door, triggering a charge of all the groceries to their Amazon account. This is well beyond the established practice of self-scanning and self-checkout and is accomplished through tracking. Make that lots of tracking. Cameras have been used in stores for many years, such as …
  • Companies Tie IoT Results To Customer Experiences
    Of all emerging technologies, the Internet of Things is viewed as the most important to business. It ranks above artificial intelligence and robots, based on a new global study. Well over half (64%) of executives see IoT as important to their current business and even more (90%) believe it will be important to the future of their business.
  • The Rise Of The Hybrid Smartwatch
    The smartwatch market is getting a bit more complicated. Since the Apple Watch launched in 2014, the common perception of smartwatches was that they could do a lot more than just tell time. Juniper Research defines a smartwatch as a wrist-based wearable that emulates traditional watch designs, as well as providing additional digital functionality.
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