| According to foreign reports, the "Financial Times" recently wrote that at the International Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas last week, the most eye-catching electronic products were those that did not look like electronic products at all. . The world's first smart comb released by Kérastase, a high-end hairdressing brand under the French beauty giant L'Oreal Group, is almost identical to the hairdressing products of other L'Oreal brands. This one has neither a blinking light nor a button to turn it on or off. |
But inside this smart comb, it contains a microphone, motion and conductivity sensors, and a wireless connector, making this hairdressing product that was originally priced at only $10 "the world's first smart comb", and the price is also close to $10. $200. Artificial intelligence has brought combs, an everyday product, into a whole new realm.
The data collected by combing hair can be sent to an app, which can calculate the hair quality score according to the algorithm, and provide the user with recommended products to improve the user's hair quality. The smart comb even makes a slight vibration if the user combs too fast, which could damage the hair.
Cedric Hutchings (Cedric Hutchings), CEO of Withings, a subsidiary of Nokia, which jointly developed the smart comb Hair Coach with Kérastase, said, "This smart comb infers and interprets the noise of brush friction. Very appalled." Hutchins acknowledged, however, that Hair Coach, which was shown at CES and will go on sale this year, has been met with skepticism. "Someone will frown and say, 'Seriously, a smart comb?'"
If this was just the reaction of exhibitors at the beginning of last week, by the end of last week, the concept was already very familiar to exhibitors. In this year's International Consumer Electronics Show, the concept of "Internet of Things" has been suppressed by artificial intelligence. From cars to refrigerators, from toothbrushes to shoes, technology startups and technology giants have launched a series of artificial intelligence products .
BK Yoon, CEO of Samsung Electronics' home appliances division, said, "In 2015, our focus was mainly on IoT devices. But now, our focus has gone beyond simple networking."
voice control
The AI wave is sweeping through consumer technology in two forms. The first involves using sound as a new, easy way to interact with everyday electronic devices. For example, Amazon's virtual voice assistant Alexa can be activated by simply calling its name and asking questions. This is a fairly popular approach among device makers who want to embed smart features into their products.
Because Amazon makes Alexa free for other manufacturers, Alexa will soon be in the dashboards of millions of Ford cars, Whirlpool washing machines, LG refrigerators, Westinghouse TVs and Lenovo stereos.
In addition to controlling Alexa-integrated devices, Alexa can also control indoor lights, doors and windows, not to mention reading the news, ordering a car through Uber, or ordering pizza. Ultimately, Amazon wants Alexa to become a truly intelligent assistant, able to deeply understand and anticipate the needs of users.
Device makers hope that embedding such AI technologies in their hardware will help consumers understand the value of the Internet of Things -- the tech world's dream of connecting billions of inanimate objects to the Internet and making them wiser. Neither connected thermostats nor "wearables" have had much resonance outside of the tech bubble.
But just as Windows dominated the PC and Google's Android dominates the smartphone market, new digital assistants like Alexa can give their developers unchecked power.
Jensen Huang, chief executive of U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, predicts that as consumers become more comfortable with digital assistant technology, consumers will gradually use digital virtual assistants mainly from technology companies such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft. "When you use Google's virtual assistant, Google Assistant, you get used to its capabilities. Over time, consumers tend to use one virtual assistant rather than 4 or 5 different virtual assistants."
Manufacturers of hardware electronics are trying to up the ante. Samsung Electronics recently acquired the artificial intelligence startup founded by the founder of Apple's Siri, a move that could not only give Samsung Electronics a virtual platform but also allow the company to reduce its overreliance on Google's Android operating system for smartphones.
Don Butler, head of Ford Motor's global connected car business, is also concerned about being dependent on Apple and Google, which have also started to dabble in cars. That also made Amazon a natural choice, Butler said, though Ford is expected to eventually open up to other digital assistants.
deep learning
The second aspect of the coming AI revolution involves analyzing the data collected by smart devices and making them more useful. As of now, many products are only able to collect data, but not to use it. One of the important developments in artificial intelligence research is "deep learning", which makes this real-world data useful.
Nvidia's graphics processing chips are used in the data centers of many Internet companies. "Artificial intelligence is the dream of all those who have long exploited the potential of computers," Huang said. "As deep learning and graphics processing chips make deep learning more practical, we've really seen new tools that reignite the AI revolution."
Tech giants including Google, Facebook and Amazon have vast amounts of data they use to train their systems to do things like understand language or recognize faces in crowds.
But Huang predicts that startups working on smaller problems will benefit from setting up smaller datasets, gleaning meaningful insights from cheap sensors akin to a smart comb. He said, "This is the golden age of AI startups. Not all of these cloud services have all the data in the world. We own our own data. Because of AI, these startups will grow rapidly."
Some of the projects that are collecting data sound unlikely. French company Kolibree, for example, has been collecting data for the past three years with its self-developed smart toothbrush — a device that collects data on, among other things, how much time people spend brushing their teeth.
Kolibree's latest product, unveiled at CES, goes a step further by attempting to evaluate 16 positions in a user's mouth at any given time. To do this, Kolibree analyzed data from hundreds of thousands of toothbrushes to train the technology, says Thomas Serval, the company's chief executive. The oral hygiene of the user can be improved through the toothbrushing feedback provided by the user.
Of course, the appearance of smart refrigerators, smart toothbrushes and smart combs at CES also inevitably raised questions: Does the world really need such wizardry digital devices? As the tech world races to invent the products of the future, people often realize that technology is being applied to them.
Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner, a market research company, said after participating in this International Consumer Electronics Show, "Users can control the curtains, they can control home appliances, and they can chat with digital assistants in the refrigerator. The problem is that these Is technology interesting?"
Part of the problem is that some capabilities of the technology are already ahead of others, which challenges device makers' ability to effectively deploy AI systems. Humanoid robotics company UBTech has built facial recognition software into its equipment, allowing its robots to assess how their human owners are feeling. But the technology doesn't yet have the ability to let a robot adjust its tone of voice or subtly change other behaviors. Currently, the Lynx robot developed by UBTech can best express itself by flashing LED lights, spinning or nodding.
The race to deploy AI has entered some near-impossible territory. For example, San Francisco startup Shadecraft has launched a smart garden parasol. The $2,500 to $3,000 device orbits the sun and features a voice assistant. “We’re still living in dark ages,” the company’s chief executive said. “But ten years from now, users will be very embarrassed if there are no smart umbrellas on the beach, if you can’t ask a robot to order a drink.”
The original address of this article: Financial Times: Artificial intelligence is like a dash connecting consumers | "This is how Linux should be learned" Author: Zheng Shuai, Auditor: Pang Zengbao