After an extended testing period and one delay, Amazon’s cashier-free grocery store finally opened to the public last month. But it seems that the experiment has already been deemed a success, as the company is reportedly planning six more Amazon Go locations by the end of this year.

According to Recode, which cites people familiar with the plans, at least three of the new stores will open in Seattle – the same city where the current Amazon Go is found – while others will appear in Los Angeles. It’s unclear if Amazon will open more outlets in different locations this year.

Recode adds that Jeff Bezos’ company has held “serious talks” with billionaire developer Rick Caruso about placing one of its stores within The Grove, L.A’s famous 600,000-square foot outdoor shopping center.

Amazon Go’s “Just Walk Out Technology” uses a combination of machine learning, computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion to determine when you pick up an item and place it in your basket. It even knows if something is returned to the shelf, should you change your mind. Once shoppers leave the premises, the total cost is automatically charged to their associated Amazon account.

While the system removes the need for cashiers, the stores are still staffed by humans who stock shelves, check IDs for alcohol purchases, and other duties, along with security guards.

After it opened in late 2016, only Amazon employees could use the company’s Seattle Go store during the lengthy beta phase. It was supposed to open in March last year, but the system reportedly struggled when more than 20 people were in the store. As such, the opening was delayed until January, though Amazon claims the delay was due to excessive demand from its employees.
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While they are due sometime in 2018, there’s no word on exactly when we’ll see the new Amazon Go stores. Given that the original has only just opened to the public, they’re more likely to arrive in the second half of the year. Eventually, it's thought that Amazon may start implementing the technology in Whole Foods outlets – the company acquired the organic-food chain in 2017. How such a move would affect Whole Foods staff is unclear.

Serial entrepreneur and social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk said it best: “I don't think anybody who's a major internet company can live without having a major voice strategy.” 

Voice will account for nearly 50% of search on mobile in the next three years and will be the primary way consumers search for and make purchases on their phones and voice-enabled devices. Everything we do will involve voice in some way, from shopping to ordering groceries to asking what the weather is outside. And thanks to the nearly 20 million voice-enabled smart speakers sold thus far by Amazon and Google, we’re already seeing the fight for the real estate in consumers’ homes.

The smart-speaker movement is taking the world by storm. We see some of the most significant companies in the world, like Amazon and Google, set the tone for how and where voice can impact consumers. And, why wouldn’t they? Nearly 30 million households are projected to have a voice-first device by the end of 2017. While they are essential in kick-starting the revolution, these smart devices won’t be the last stop on the voice train.

While the adoption of smart speakers has risen rapidly, the usage of third-party applications, or “skills,” has been less than impressive. Less than 3% of skills built on top of Alexa are actually getting used, which is in most cases a result of the limited functionality of these applications. For example, Domino’s users want more than just their “easy order” or something they order over and over again. Reviews of the Starbucks integration with Alexa note that many orders never make it to the barista, only to bring more users back to the mobile app instead. And those that want flowers for that special someone are limited to seasonality or occasion with the 1-800 Flowers integration, without a way to actually see the flowers or gifts they’re ordering. Voice is capable of so much more.

The large platform companies have focused their energies on developing voice assistants that offer broad yet shallow integrations with third parties. As a result, “skills” just scratch the surface of what’s possible with voice. As the examples above demonstrate, while it’s relatively simple to build and launch an application for these platforms, you’re limited by what’s possible from a functional point of view.

To realize voice's full potential, companies need a more deeply integrated voice experience that is brand specific and is all knowing about their business. In retail, for example, the art of the consumer experience lies in discovery and personalization. Very rarely do you know the exact product you’re looking for when you go to a website or browse the “most popular” products section. That’s why companies invest millions in their mobile apps and websites, helping guide you through an experience to find exactly what you want. Voice is going through an evolution of its own, assisting companies to understand how to build much more meaningful customer experiences. It could be as simple as knowing that when you want a new sweatshirt, ordering your last order just won’t do. You want to see it in front of you, most likely on a mobile device and will ask a series of questions around color, price, size, material, and reviews. 

Imagine a voice experience where you can search for flowers for your mother, or someone special, watching the results on the screen in front of you change based on your budget, your color preference or type of flower. Imagine a fall selection of coffee flavors coming out in your favorite chain coffee shop, empowering you to add pumpkin spice, a shot of vanilla, and change from cold to hot once you’ve stepped outside. 
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There’s no question that Google and Amazon have birthed a genuinely revolutionary time in technology, conditioning us to be comfortable using a voice-powered device or experience, but we’re just at the precipice of the potential of voice. Voice, just like the introduction of the mobile device before it, will fundamentally change how we interact with the world around us. Only when you understand that, will you see how powerful voice will be.

Confirming rumors, Samsung last week revealed the existence of "Bixby," a new AI assistant that debuted with the Galaxy S8 and will challenge Apple's Siri with some new technologies.

Bixby, for instance, can handle many tasks that otherwise use touch or button input, Samsung said. Siri —and other AIs, like Google Assistant – typically only support a small selection of voice commands. Through contextual awareness, Bixby users should even be able to mix touch and voice input.

Bixby will also offer what Samsung describes as "cognitive tolerance," allowing it to recognize commands with incomplete information. As needed, it will prompt for more details.

In iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, Siri still requires that people use specific, fully-formed voice commands, which also don't adapt to what's onscreen. Google Assistant is more flexible, but doesn't support a mix of touch and voice.

The S8 has a dedicated Bixby button letting people trigger the assistant at any time, Samsung noted. Just a handful of pre-installed apps will support the platform at first however, and the company will only "eventually" release an SDK for third-party developers.
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First-party support should gradually extend to other Samsung hardware, including not just phones but devices like TVs and air conditioners. 

Remember when consumers first embraced the smartphone and then as demand increased, consumers pushed that technology into the enterprise? Well, the same thing is happening with a home digital product, Echo, as it begins to see software written for it that solves enterprise problems.

Last week, $6 billion software company Atlassian announced that it's bringing its popular HipChat app to the Amazon Echo family of smart speakers — making HipChat the first chat program available on Echo, and possibly marking a milestone in moving virtual assistants from the living room to the boardroom.

Most Amazon Echo services (Amazon calls them "skills") are passive, meaning you need to call on Alexa, the device’s personal digital assistant, before it will do anything. But HipChat on Echo is designed to be active, calling out when certain pre-set conditions are met.

HipChat General Manager, Steve Goldsmith, says that Atlassian teams have been testing Echo internally as an alert system when things go wrong: If an Atlassian site or service goes down, the system automatically sends a message into HipChat, which then triggers the Echo to activate and shout an alert at the team.

Instead of sending alerts to personal smartphones or tablets, Goldsmith says, the Echo is a "neutral piece of hardware." Put one in the corner of the room, and it's a team's communal voice box. In the same way that a family might share an Echo, so too does a software team, Goldsmith says.

Amazon says the Echo will become a key pillar of its business in the future, with thousands of developers tasked to building and improving it. The existence of the forthcoming Google Home device, a direct Echo competitor, is certainly a sign that Amazon is on the right track.
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While, right now, so much of the Echo's use is fun and games, the device's continued popularity, and the overall industry shift towards voice, means that HipChat on Echo could be a sign of things to come.

According to Amazon, the cop of the future won’t just be a robot; it will be one that fits in the palm of your hand.

Recently, the retail giant was granted a patent for a miniature, voice-controlled “unmanned aerial vehicle assistant” to be used by everyone from officers making traffic stops to shoppers just trying to figure out where they parked their cars.

According to the patent, off-board processing could be used to significantly reduce the size of the assistants compared to today’s drones while substantially increasing their capabilities. In one scenario described by Amazon, a UAV assistant would launch from a dock on a police officer’s microphone to act as a mobile dash cam and miniature partner.

 “As shown in [the illustration above], during a routine traffic stop, for example, the officer can command the [drone] to ‘hover’ or ‘follow me,’” reads the patent. “In some examples, if a foot chase develops during a traffic stop, the officer can command the [drone] to follow the suspect so that he can attempt to cut the suspect off in the cruiser. Similarly, if there are two or more suspects, the officer can command the [drone] to follow one the suspects, while he gives chase to the other.”

While the patent’s diagrams focus on law enforcement applications, Amazon believes the assistant could be used “for many other purposes,” including clearing buildings for military forces and even helping people decide if it’s worth waiting in line.

“If a user is waiting in a long line to buy concert tickets, for example, the user may not be able to see over the crowd to see how many total people are in line,” reads the patent. “In this case, the user can just say ‘hover’ to the UAV and the UAV can take up a position at a predetermined distance above the user (e.g., 15 feet).”
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When Amazon began investing in drones, it aimed to make a world where flying robots delivered customers their books and USB cables. Now, it seems, the internet’s biggest retailer has set its sights even higher.

Over a year ago, Google announced plans to build a modular smartphone. Since then, they have been quiet about what they were doing until this year’s I/O Developer’s Conference. Google said that Project Ara would deliver a developer’s edition of the phone by fourth quarter 2016 and a consumer version should be available sometime in 2017. You may want to watch Google’s YouTube video of the project.

Project Ara is based on the idea that you should be able to assemble a smartphone around different modules, swapping components at will. That may sound a lot like LG's G5, which lets you replace the bottom of the smartphone with parts like a camera module with dedicated shutter controls, but Ara's approach is a lot more complex. The design Google showed off has slots for six modules.

Swapping in those different parts will let you easily tailor the functionality of your phone to your liking. More important, Google argues, it means you can replace outdated components of your phone with newer parts while keeping the phone itself, thus extending the life cycle of your mobile devices.
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In a demo done at this year’s I/O conference, a Google engineer inserted a camera module onto a phone that could take a photo without rebooting. That's a vast improvement over last year’s demo where the Ara phone had to reboot before the camera module would work. Removing the module is simply a matter of using a voice command or selecting an eject option from settings. The prototype looks fairly compact if the modules themselves sport a blocky appearance — like a Tetris board if you could use it to make phone calls.
Google has already lined up some partners to develop Ara modules, including Panasonic and TDK among a host of others. And it hopes the release of a developer kit will bring along even more modules, which could include everything from health monitoring to navigation.

When we look into the crystal ball, we are finding some prominent technology trends in the consumer space that are also stimulating innovation and transformation in the enterprise space.

There are many technologies impacting manufacturing and other sectors ranging from healthcare, transportation, retail and education. But here we are going to focus on a single potential game-changer, artificial intelligence (AI).

AI could reboot businesses and empower them to achieve a sustainable, quantum improvement in performance that alters the trajectory of the future. It’s about identifying new ways for companies to do things differently, and to innovate around the technology.

AI is coming of age as business leaders grasp the immense potential of ‘smart’ machines as catalysts for greater efficiencies and competitiveness. By 2019, the global market for content analytics, discovery and cognitive systems software is projected to reach $9.2 billion, according to IDC’s recent Worldwide Content Analytics, Discovery, and Cognitive Systems Software Forecast.

Late last year, AI advanced with image recognition software being used to challenge the typical text search. Pinterest and online footwear retailer Shoes.com are testing new ways to search or browse using just images rather than text, according to a recent report in MIT’s Technology Review.

Each year, Edge.org, a think tank organization publishes essays from thought leaders and researchers related to a hot topic in public and academic discourse. This year’s question was, “What do you think about machines that think?” In grappling with this question, a major comment thread was that AI is no longer a future abstraction but rather is becoming a tangible reality.

In the Edge.org probe, several other themes emerged. AI is expected to augment human workers—making humans more effective, sharpening their expertise and facilitating innovation by reducing the barriers between humans and machines. For now, augmentation is more common in the area of cognitive computing, in which machines can sense, comprehend and even act alone. Cognitive computing is more about “person and machine” rather than “person versus machine.”

Other scenarios see AI in the form of digital assistants that humans can use to more effectively perform tasks like enterprise customer service, workflow management or collaboration. 
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This trend is disrupting the “old order.” Smart, connected products are transforming companies, corporate strategies, entire value chains or ecosystems, as well as quality of life and competition. AI holds the promise of unleashing a new wave of creativity, opportunities and profitability. It will drive another chapter in the ongoing industrial technological revolution and offer companies, countries and economies opportunities to reinvent themselves for a more vibrant and optimistic future. 

There are times when, out of the blue, a new product hits the market and blows all of the competition away. That appears to be the case with the new app called Hound. This is a digital assistant application written by the makers of the music discovery app SoundHound.

Typhone.nl, a Dutch testing organization, conducted tests between the various voice assistant features on multiple platforms. The tests put Hound up against more established players like Siri, Google Now and Cortana. So how did Hound fare against all the competition? Extremely well.

It seems that one of the strong suits of Hound is its ability to recognize users who have a heavy accent. It is also able to follow up on previous enquiries made by the user, as opposed to the other apps where a followup query is usually treated as a new search, meaning that depending on how you phrase it, they won’t be able to catch onto the context of your query.

Several sources say that the company has had the app in development for years and it shows. Hound takes the other three digital assistants to the woodshed and just beats them up! There are two YouTube videos listed at the end of this article. Be sure to visit each so you can see what Hound can really do. Here are some of the questions Hound can answer with lightening speed:

•  “How many days are there between the day after tomorrow and three days before the second Thursday of November 2022?”
  
•  “What is the population of the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located?”
  
•  “What is the capital and population for Japan and China and their areas in square miles and square kilometers, and also tell me how many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France and Italy?”
  
•  “Show me Asian restaurants excluding Chinese and Japanese?”
  

The app doesn’t just answer complex questions.  You can have it book a hotel inside of a specific price range with a given number of stars in its rating that has a gym, free wi-fi and is not a bed and breakfast.

The demos on YouTube point to a product that is close to release. But the app is currently in an invite-only beta and the company hasn’t commented on any release date.

YouTube Videos:

Functionality Overview   
Speed Demo