Amazon is reportedly planning to launch a brand new model of its sensible speaker Echo on Tuesday that features a display for making video calls. The unique Echo is a digital assistant that may play spoken music requests, reply questions on a sports activities rating, report the climate or learn the information. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Amazon is anticipated to announce a brand new Echo sensible residence speaker on Tuesday. The massive distinction: it’s going to include a display that permits customers to make video calls, The Wall Street Journal reports. The 7-inch contact display will even show solutions to spoken questions with Google-like search outcomes, the Journal provides. Amazon workers have been testing the brand new speaker for the previous couple of months, and it may begin delivery to shoppers as early as June. The system will reportedly value $200, greater than the present, screen-less Echo that prices $180. In April, Amazon launched a separate model of the sensible residence speaker known as Echo Look, which included a digicam that might give fashion recommendation on outfits, and which was additionally priced at $200.
The new speaker may give Amazon an extra increase at a time when it’s already racing forward of Alphabet’s Google, Apple and Samsung to promote sensible residence units you can use as digital assistants. A new forecast from eMarketer says Amazon’s Echo system would seize 70.6% of the marketplace for voice-enabled audio system within the United States in 2017, effectively forward of Google Home’s 23.eight%. “eMarketer expects Amazon’s market share to fall barely within the coming years, as Google’s share grows,” the market analysis agency mentioned. “But Amazon will stay the dominant participant within the class for the foreseeable future.”
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Uber has constructed a brand new analysis unit in Toronto, Canada the place dozens of engineers will develop synthetic intelligence software program for driverless automobiles, Forbes writer Alan Ohnsman reports. Raquel Urtasun, a professor specializing in machine studying on the University of Toronto, will lead the brand new group. Uber’s Chief Executive Travis Kalanick mentioned in a blog post on Monday that Urtasun was “one of many world’s main researchers within the fields of machine notion and synthetic intelligence.” The analysis hub is Uber’s first R&D operation outdoors the U.S., Ohnsman writes. Last yr engineers at its Advanced Technologies Group in Pittsburgh started testing early variations of Uber’s personal driverless-car system.
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Facebook is again up and working for a lot of customers in Asia, New Zealand, Australia and elements of North America following an outage that affected its cellular app and Messenger, based on DownDetector.com. The website, which collects standing experiences from sources like Twitter, mentioned Facebook began having points at 9.48pm EST on Monday, and that the outages appeared to nonetheless be affecting elements of Asia and South America at 4pm EST on Tuesday. Facebook made no point out of an outage on its official Twitter feed.
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Nvidia has unveiled new video analytics software program that may enable metropolis governments to raised detect issues by way of their video-surveillance streams. The Nvidia Metropolis platform will use synthetic intelligence to observe video streams for incidents of crimes or worsening site visitors, the corporate mentioned in a press launch on Tuesday. Nvidia argues that whereas there are lots of of hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras capturing information on a regular basis, people can solely monitor a fraction of that content material. The graphics processing unit (GPU) maker claims its deep-learning expertise will be capable to make inferences about what’s being filmed “instantaneously,” and that the Metropolis platform was “paving the way in which for the creation of AI cities.” It didn’t identify any cities that had been planning to make use of the analytics platform.
