Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Could your Samsung tv replace your Amazon Echo?


Could your Samsung TV replace your Amazon Echo?

Thoughts?

 

 

UWON, South Korea-- Kim Hyun-suk, who leads Samsung Electronics Co.'s push into artificial intelligence, is perplexed by the voice-activated speaker craze.

"Deep down, I wonder why everyone is talking about speakers," said Mr. Kim, the new CEO of Samsung's consumer- electronics unit, in a rare interview. The South Korean company sells half a billion devices and appliances every year.

"Isn't it the same as already having 500 million speakers out there?" Mr. Kim said.

Samsung, the world's largest maker of smartphones, TVs and semiconductors, is about to find out if that is true. Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Amazon.com Inc. have popularized the tabletop speaker, creating a mainstream gadget that people are comfortable speaking to. This has given the two American companies an early advantage in bringing AI into the home.

But Samsung--whose own voice-activated speaker has yet to debut--has a broader vision: It promises to put AI features and internet connectivity onto all its products by 2020.

The goal is to transform Samsung's stand-alone home appliances into an army of easier-to-use synced devices capable of fielding verbal commands. The bet, if successful, would increase consumer demand for Samsung's lineup of phones, appliances and televisions, as it fends off the growing ambitions of Silicon Valley rivals and lower-cost Chinese manufacturers.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/samsung-wants-every-appliance-to-talk-to-you-by-2020-1527076012

Saturday, May 5, 2018

MATRIX and RIOT FOSS messaging?

Anyone out there using come across https://Matrix.org  FOSS secure messaging platform?




I’d never heard of it before today but came across this article
-  https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed-as-the-basis-for-frances-secure-instant-messenger-app/
We’re incredibly excited that the Government of France has confirmed it is in the process of deploying a huge private federation of Matrix homeservers spanning the whole government, and developing a fork of Riot.im for use as their official secure communications client! The goal is to replace usage of WhatsApp or Telegram for official purposes. It’s a unbelievably wonderful situation that we’re living in a world where governments genuinely care about openness, open source and open-standard based communications – and Matrix’s decentralisation and end-to-end encryption is a perfect fit for intra- and inter-governmental communication.


Seems that more than a few people have indicated they are moving to https://about.riot.im/riot-is-free/   eg. https://blog.status.im/were-moving-to-riot-for-safer-decentralized-collaboration-df54af3db2ef  from Slack/Telegram etc but i’m unable to understand why SPAM that’s happening on Slack/Whats App isn’t just going to move across?


I am also particularly interested to hear what peoples thoughts are on their VR conferencing offering - https://matrix.org/vrdemo/#/room/#vrvc_worried-plankton:conf.matrix.org and how it compares to other solutions they’ve tried.




Cheers,
Dean

Thursday, May 3, 2018