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AI to seep further into everyday life at Berlin’s IFA
BERLIN, Aug 29, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Electronics manufacturers are betting on
artificial intelligence weaving itself ever more tightly into our
relationships with their products on show at this year’s IFA, the sector’s
annual Berlin trade fair.
From Friday, “new releases in the artificial intelligence niche will be the
ones everyone is talking about” at the industry event in the German capital,
predicted Gartner analyst Annette Zimmermann.
South Korean giant Samsung, through a new connected speaker, Home Galaxy,
equipped to respond to spoken commands, may send its voice assistant Bixby
into battle with Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri for
dominance of living rooms and kitchens.
Such devices made a splash at last year’s IFA, making the 2018 show an
opportunity to take stock of their reception among the public.
Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2020, some 75 percent of American
households will use a voice assistant.
Meanwhile similar technology is extending its reach into connected devices
from fridges to lightbulbs, gigantic televisions with ever-higher resolution,
and wearables used to track fitness data.
Such mass-market products are the bread-and-butter of IFA, which
traditionally contrasts with its nerdier Las Vegas-based American equivalent
CES.
– Augmented reality –
Also from Korea, Samsung rival LG is set to unveil its CLOi SuitBot, a
powered exoskeleton that increases the user’s leg strength and can be
networked with the firm’s other robots for complex tasks.
But visitors looking for novelty in their everyday tech companion, the
smartphone, will be disappointed.
Apple has historically shunned IFA, while Samsung unveiled its top-end
Galaxy Note 9 phone just a few weeks ago.
Neither is a major announcement expected from China’s Huawei, a star of
past years at the Berlin show.
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Instead, the 2018 edition could be a breakthrough moment for augmented-
reality applications that have so far left consumers unimpressed.
The technology superimposes digitally-generated elements like sounds or 2D
and 3D images onto real-world scenes, for example in an Ikea app that allows
users to virtually try out the furniture giant’s sofas or bookshelves in
their homes.
With new glasses, lenses and helmets, “there are more and more technologies
available that include very high-quality content, whether it’s augmented-
reality Harry Potter or shopping applications”, said Klaus Boehm of
consultancy Deloitte.
Filling out the vast halls of Berlin’s trade fair centre will be a
bewildering array of products from around the world that range from the
practical to the — in some eyes — downright dangerous.
Under German law, items like hoverboards, powered “monowheels” and electric
skates can only be test-driven away from public roads.
And there are certain to be thousands of exhibitors showing off the latest
fridge that re-orders food when stocks run low or Bluetooth headsets with an
extra hour of battery life — jockeying for position in a relentless
technology race.
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