New Florence. New Renaissance.

BMW’s voice-controlled assistant

It can pick up on routines and habits, allowing users to simply say "Hey BMW, take me home" when they want to navigate back to their house, for example. Additionally, simple statements like "Hey BMW, I'm cold" or "Hey BMW, I'm tired" will lead the assistant to adjust settings like the temperature, lighting and music, accordingly.

Users can also ask the assistant about various aspects of their vehicle, such as how the automatic high beams work, if the oil level is sufficient or whether there are any current warnings. Drivers can also give it access to their calendars in order to receive updates about when they should leave for a scheduled appointment. In the future, BMW says the assistant will also be able to alert drivers to potential issues, like the tire pressure being low, share fuel-saving tips and arrange appointments with a service center. It will also be compatible with other digital assistants, like Alexa, and will be accessible from smart speakers and phones.

Engadget

Alexa as hotel butler

Alexa for hospitality would assist in providing services ranging from ordering room service to requesting housekeeping or calling the concierge for dinner recommendations without picking up the phone.

The company said the partnership will start this summer at Marriott’s select properties and the service will be available by invitation to other hotel chains.

Reuters

 

Google Duplex

Onstage at I/O 2018, Google showed off a jaw-dropping new capability of Google Assistant: in the not too distant future, it’s going to make phone calls on your behalf. CEO Sundar Pichai played back a phone call recording that he said was placed by the Assistant to a hair salon. The voice sounded incredibly natural; the person on the other end had no idea they were talking to a digital AI helper. Google Assistant even dropped in a super casual “mmhmmm” early in the conversation.

Pichai reiterated that this was a real call using Assistant and not some staged demo. “The amazing thing is that Assistant can actually understand the nuances of conversation,” he said. “We’ve been working on this technology for many years. It’s called Google Duplex.”

Duplex really feels like next-level AI stuff, but Google’s chief executive said it’s still very much under development. Google plans to conduct early testing of Duplex inside Assistant this summer “to help users make restaurant reservations, schedule hair salon appointments, and get holiday hours over the phone.”

The Verge

 

Displays for Digital Assistants

These displays can do anything a standard Google Home or Assistant-enabled speaker can do, but with a few added benefits.

Those benefits include being able to see and not just hear your calendar events, being able to check the weather and latest news with a visual aspect, and even being able to get directions on Maps and see traffic information. One of the biggest highlights in my opinion, though, is the ability to make calls on Google Duo, something that’s just getting easier and easier.

Personally, I think these “smart displays” are the future of Google Assistant, and for me I don’t think it’s going to be worth buying anything else going forward. Speakers are great, but when you slap on this software and a display, it becomes something truly magical.

Below Lenovo’s Smart Display which showed well at the recent CES

9to5Google

 

IoT and Voice interfaces on the farm

Mrinal Wadhwa, CTO at the IoT company, Fybr recently shared with me this interesting use case in farming.

"A plum farm lost $ 2 million dollars in revenue, last year, because the heat affected the crop and truck loads of fruit were rejected by Costco.

Fybr is working with this plum grower to create an early warning system with infrared sensors that continuously monitor the amount of heat that the tree canopy is experiencing. In contrast to weather forecasts, this sensor information is timely, granular, local and actionable. A farm manager may turn on irrigation sprinklers to cool down the field on a particularly hot day. Fybr also retrofitted their irrigation pumps and drip lines for wireless remote control, a step towards automating the sense-and-respond process.

Low cost sensing, remotely controllable equipment and data driven learning algorithms will help farms in the near future protect against the risk of sudden weather events, significantly reduce wasted water and improve crop yields. As the amount of real-time information available about their farm grows, it's impractical for farmers to navigate through apps on a tablet or a phone while they work in their fields. Voice based command and query will be a potent tool for growers to proactively respond to changing conditions.

Older voice technologies, like Apple's Siri, had minimal customization capabilities for enterprises, but the latest with Google's Assistant/Dialogflow/Cloud Speech and Amazon's Alexa/Lex/Polly provide powerful tools for enterprises to quickly build high quality natural language interfaces.

In the below video, Fybr's Alexa integration is able to interpret and identify the correct irrigation pump and opens it successfully. Even a small error rate in this would be unacceptable in business critical applications. The next challenge - improving user identity and authentication around voice technologies."

 

Don’t call it a phone. It is an Assistant.

The Assistant is even standing by to help you before you even unlock your phone, thanks to the Pixel 2's new always-on display feature. In addition to the usual time, date and notification info that appears on the phone's screen, the Assistant can also detect any music that's playing around you — say a song playing at a café — pulling up information about the artist. Tap on that song to go to the Assistant where you can perform all sorts of other functions like adding the song to your library, playing the video on YouTube or searching the web for more information. It's like Shazam, but without ever having to bother to fire up the app.

Assistant figures to get smarter as well. The new Pixels will be the first phone to feature Google Lens, an object recognition feature first previewed at this year's I/O developers conference. Google Lens will work both in the Photos and Camera apps. Tap on an object in a photo you've shot, and the Assistant will summon up information about it. Or point your camera at a book or movie poster and you can summon up reviews.

Tom’s Guide

 

There must be 50 ways to talk to Alexa

I asked Alexa on my Fire TV remote "what’s the difference between the Dot and the Echo", and she responded “sorry I don’t know”

The Verge is more helpful and writes

• If you want a speaker, go with Echo
• if you want a screen, go with Show
• if you just want a digital assistant, go with the Dot
• if you want a different form/factor, try Triby which brings you Alexa in a digital white board for your fridge, or GE which brings it in a circular lamp (see below)

Alexa now has over 15,000 “skills”. Expect a growing list of devices to allow you to converse with her.

 

Digital Assistants proliferate

The race to the bottom in voice control smart speakers has officially begun. Alibaba, the Chinese version of Amazon, has unveiled its $73 Tianmao JinglingX1, or Alibaba Tmall Genie X1 for short. The device is only available in China for now and only speaks in Mandarin. According to CNBC, two other giant Asian firms have also unveiled voice control smart speakers: search company Baidu with its Xiaoyu Zaijia and e-commerce company JD.com with its LingLong DingDong.

These new players come on the heels of Apple’s recent HomePod unveiling, which carries a much heftier $349 price tag. Apple’s approach is a higher-end play, coming in at a much higher price tag than rivals Amazon Echo and Google Home while targeting Sonos on the audio quality side. Meanwhile, news reports from Techcrunch indicate that Samsung will migrate its Galaxy phone voice control system, dubbed Bixby, into its own voice control smart speaker.

Electronic House

 

Microsoft’s Chief Literary Officer

Cortana is Microsoft’s personal AI assistant for smartphones, named for a fictional character from the company’s sci-fi video game series Halo.Strictly speaking, engineers coded her into existence, but her well-timed wit comes courtesy of Microsoft’s resident blabbermouth, principal content publishing manager Jonathan Foster, and his creative posse of novelists, journalists, poets, filmmakers and playwrights who together shape the sass and spunk behind the gabby digital helper.

So the need to soften a bot’s cold, calculated edges has led to a new emerging path for poets, comedians and fiction writers like Foster inside tech companies. Foster, who earned an M.F.A. in film and playwriting from the University of Southern California, has written several plays and one novel — and loves writing witty banter.

Oxy

See how Amazon Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana would do in a stand up routine