Even smart toothbrushes have AI now

Before the likes of Oral-B started selling Bluetooth-enabled, app-connected toothbrushes, there was Kolibree. The startup developed one of the first “smart” toothbrushes that incentivized regular brushing and documented oral hygiene habits. We caught the first Kolibree brush at CES several years ago ahead of its successful Kickstarter campaign, and this year the company is back at the tech show with a new model: the Ara. So, what’s the latest innovation in smart toothbrushes? AI, of course.

“Patented deep learning algorithms are embedded directly inside the toothbrush on a low-power processor,” Kolibree’s press release reads. One of the benefits of this new chip is you don’t need the companion app open on your mobile for brushing data to be recorded. The device can store all the info from its bevy of motion sensors in “offline” mode, syncing up with the app next time you load it.

The primary reason for the AI component, though, is so the brush can analyze your behavior and provide more personalized feedback regarding your poor hygiene — either at a glance within the app, or via a weekly email report. Healthcare is one of the most promising avenues for AI, where complex data-crunching can potentially improve disease understanding and treatment. But do we really need to cram Jarvis into an electric toothbrush?

One “leading health insurer” in Italy thinks it’s more than a buzzword, at least, having committed to offering the Ara to its clients. Kolibree also plans to start a study this spring in Europe and the US to clinically validate the value of AI in improving oral health. If you’re less cynical than us, the Ara is now available to pre-order from Kolibree for $79 until the end of February, at which point the introductory price will jump to $129.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Source: Kolibree (Business Wire)

HP’s Sprout Pro looks nicer (and works better) than the original

In 2014, HP unveiled the original Sprout — a unique all-in-one with a projector and camera extrusion that turns the surface between you and the display into an interactive space. It was designed for creative professionals and hobbyists, and a later version released in 2016 targeted the classroom. This year, HP has a new Sprout called the Pro G2, which the company says is a completely redesigned device, featuring “a higher resolution projection, more powerful processing, advanced 3D scanning and a more accurate precision active pen for drawing compared to the previous model.” Basically, then, the Pro G2 should feel faster, more precise and more realistic than before, which still seems to us more like an incremental upgrade than an overhaul.

In fact, the most obvious difference between the new Sprout and its older versions is the black paint job on its display, projector and base, which makes it look more futuristic than its predecessors. The Pro G2 also has a slightly larger 23.8-inch display, up from 23 inches on the older model, as well as a bigger 21.3-inch touchpad that we’ll get to in a bit.

At a recent briefing in San Francisco, my west coast-based colleague Robbie had a chance to try out the new Sprout, and he really enjoyed using the new pen. He also found the new palm rejection software to be mostly accurate, although it did register the side of his hand once and recorded it as a scribble.

Like the Sprouts before it, the Pro G2 has what HP calls a Touch Mat — a touchscreen that supports 20 simultaneous touch points so you and a friend can use all your fingers to draw your digital projects. One of the cooler things the Sprout can do is scan 3D objects that you place on or above the Touch Mat, then letting you manipulate the model on either of the displays. You can also place an up to A3-sized piece of paper on the mat and scan that document. The Pro G2 has a camera with the same resolution as before, but it now offers what the company calls “quick 3D Capture Capability” that can read an object that you hold and rotate in front of it.

Other updates include a new seventh-generation Intel Core i7 processor, NVIDIA GTX 960M graphics card and a new active stylus — an upgrade over the old passive one. This improvement is what enabled the pressure sensitivity that Robbie noted. It also allows the Pro G2 to distinguish between input from your hand and from the pen.

All these hardware tools are nice to have, but if you can’t use them with very many programs at all, they might as well be rocks. The good news is, HP continues to expand the Sprout library of compatible software, which was previously somewhat limited. This year, the company created a suite of apps called WorkTools that lets users scan and manipulate content in 2D and 3D in an interactive clipboard. Unfortunately, Robbie wasn’t able to try out the software during his briefing, so we’ll have to wait till we get a deeper dive with the new Sprout tone able to share how well this worked.

The company also released a new “Professional” SDK, that will hopefully spur developers to come up with more ways to use the Sprout’s unique interface, potentially making it far more useful. However, HP did offer an SDK in 2014, and since then we haven’t seen many third-party creators jump on the platform.

HP hasn’t shared how much the Sprout Pro G2 will cost, and says that information will be available in March. Given that last year’s Pro cost $2,199, it’s safe to guess the new computer will be at least as expensive as before. For art schools and designers businesses, though, this might be a valuable investment.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Amazon Fire TV is now built into 4K sets

You won’t have to buy a separate Fire TV device just to use Amazon’s full services on your TV. Seiki, Westinghouse and Element Electronics are launching a series of 4K sets with Fire TV technology built-in. They all include Amazon’s current interface, including a wide range of Alexa voice commands thanks to a microphone-equipped remote. If you use an over-the-air TV antenna, you’ll have access to both a channel guide and favorite individual channels on the home screen.

None of the companies are ready to talk pricing or exact ship dates (you’ll only get them sometime “later this year”). However, there will be 43-, 50-, 55- and 65-inch models. And given that these brands (usually) focus on lower-cost TVs, there’s a good chance that you won’t have to pay a premium for native Amazon features. The question is whether or not you’ll see any other major TV makers follow suit. Heavyweights like Samsung, LG and Sony already have highly developed smart TV platforms (whether in-house or Android TV), and it’s doubtful they’ll ditch their existing strategies just to say they have Fire TV support.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Source: PR Newswire

Kuri home robot can read to your kids and watch your home

You may not have to wait for the likes of ASUS’ Zenbo to cross the ocean before you can get an affordable home robot. Mayfield Robotics (one of Bosch’s startups) has taken the wraps off of Kuri, a 20-inch-tall robot companion that promises to play nicely with your smart home. It can answer questions with a human-like touch (facial expressions, head gestures and sounds), watch over your home with a 1080p camera and play audio, whether it follows you around with music or reads to your kids. It’s reportedly easy to program, and you can use IFTTT to have it talk to other smart household devices.

The bot can recognize individual people, and putts around much like a robotic vacuum: it can avoid objects and stairs, and it’ll return to its charging dock when its “hours” of battery life run out. It’ll be a while before Kuri ships, unfortunately, as Mayfield plans a launch sometime in the holiday season. You can pre-order the robot today with a $100 deposit, though, and the $699 price is just low enough that it might be justifiable if you want a robotic helper that can follow you around.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Source: Kuri

Hyundai’s connected cars now work with Google Assistant

Hyundai is giving you another way to shout orders at its connected Blue Link cars shortly after it revealed an Amazon Alexa partnership. The company is teaming with Google, letting you give commands to Sante Fe, Sonata or other compatible models via its voice-controlled Assistant. Using a Google Home device, you’ll be able to say “OK Google, start my Sante Fe and set the temperature to 72 degrees,” or “ask Blue Link to lock my car,” to give just a couple examples.

Voice-controlled devices like Alexa make a certain amount of sense with connected cars, letting you do certain actions a bit quicker than using a smartphone app. Automakers like Ford, BMW and Hyundai all released “skills” for Echo devices, and Google’s Assistant works in a similar way. With Google’s search functions and AI assistant working together, you can simply tell it to find a “great steakhouse,” and it’ll find one and send directions to your vehicle.

It’s more of an add-on feature rather than full integration, but we might see more comprehensive in-car features coming at CES Google. The company recently revealed Android-based infotainment devices with Fiat Chrysler (FCA), and we’re expecting a raft of similar announcements during CES. Interestingly, FCA’s system uses Android Nougat and not the Android Auto branding, so hopefully Google will further clarify its plans.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Source: Hyundai

ASUS lays claim to the ‘world’s lightest 14-inch business laptop’

If weight is your biggest concern when buying a laptop, you’ve probably grown used to 11- and 13-inch ultraportables. If you’re looking for something a little bigger, but still light, ASUS may have something for you. Weighing in at 2.31 pounds, the company’s new 14-inch ASUSPro B9440 claims to be the lightest business notebook in its class. Despite its larger screen, the machine itself is actually pretty small: At just 12.6 inches wide, it’s actually a little narrower than the 13-inch MacBook Air.

ASUS says a thin screen bezel and lightweight magnesium alloy were the trick to making the ASUSPro so portable, which seems to be how other laptop makers have been achieving smaller footprints as well. Despite a more compact design here, however, the laptop still has some decent internals. The B9440 comes with a full HD display, up to 16GB of RAM, a seventh-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 CPU and as much as 512GB of solid-state storage. All pretty standard stuff — but at least the machine’s tilted keyboard will make it stand out in the office. The ASUSPro is scheduled to ship this May for $999.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Mattel built a $300 Echo for kids

It’s late and you’re tired. Before you can knock off for the night. However, there’s one thing left to do: read your child a bedtime story. In Mattel’s world, you might not have to pick up a book, or even put on voices for their favorite characters. That’s because it’s working on an Echo-style speaker with an assistant called Aristotle. It’s built specifically for kids, offering games, facts and soothing sounds on demand. Most importantly, it has the smarts to recognize your little one’s less-than-perfect speech, and adapt as they get older and more curious about the wider world.

As Fast Company and Bloomberg reports, Aristotle has the voice of an upbeat twenty-something teacher. When your child is a toddler, a companion camera transforms the speaker into a smart home baby monitor, streaming an encrypted video feed to your smartphone. You can program the device to play relaxing sounds when they wake, glow with their favorite colors or start a quick, quiet game. As a parent, you can switch to ‘adult mode’ by summoning Amazon’s Alexa assistant — the second voice companion bundled into the speaker — and log wet diapers, feedings and the like. Amazon will then know when you’re running low on supplies and order new ones automatically.

Aristotle will then grow with you and your kid. It’ll take on the role of tutor, friend and babysitter, keeping it entertained and informed while you’re not around. If the little tyke is struggling with their homework, they’ll be able to ask questions much like Amazon’s Echo or the Google Home speaker. These questions are collected and interpreted by Microsoft, through Bing search smarts and Cortana conversational analysis. Aristotle is also meant for play, identifying and reacting to natural play. Mattel envisions toy cars that connect over NFC, or perhaps with object recognition; it’ll then make appropriate sounds when the tiny vehicle crashes into a wall or screeches around a bed post.

Aristotle isn’t flawless, however. You’ll need to read a paragraph of text with your child before it can recognize their voice correctly. It will also retail for $300 when it launches in June, a price that far exceeds Amazon and Google’s rival hardware.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Source: Fast Company, Bloomberg

The Honor 6x does the iPhone’s portrait trick for $250

Smartphones with dual cameras are about to become the norm now that Apple has jumped aboard the bandwagon. And they’re about to spread to more affordable phones too. Budget phone maker Honor has just unveiled the $250 Honor 6x, which the company says is the first smartphone “in its price range” to sport two cameras on the rear. After a few days with a preview unit, I found the Honor 6x decent for the price, with its dual camera setup in particular delivering mostly effective results.

Like its predecessor, the Honor 6x is sturdy, but otherwise has a forgettable design. Its metal body is not as dense as slightly more expensive mid-range phones from Huawei, OnePlus, ZTE and LeEco, making it feel less premium. Still, it’s lightweight, slightly curved body makes for a good grip.

The Honor 6x’s 5.5-inch full HD IPS display isn’t as rich or saturated as what you’ll find on a slightly pricier phone, but it does the job. Images and videos look clear; the orange flames and Spiderman’s blue and red costume were vivid in a trailer for Homecoming. However, I’ve gotten used to — and even prefer — the deeper blacks, higher contrast and punchier colors on higher-end devices. The 6x’s screen is also hard to see in direct sunlight, since its max output is a relatively dim 300 nits. At $250, though, the phone’s display isn’t worth complaining about.

Something worth griping about, though, is the Honor 6x’s outdated software. The Honor 6x will ship with the older 4.1 version of the company’s EMUI overlay over Android 6.0 Marshmallow. This means you won’t get the option to enable the app drawer that EMUI eschews,or the slicker Settings interface that the new EMUI 5.0 offers on devices like the Huawei Mate 9. Honor promises that an update to Android N and EMUI 5.0 will arrive early this year, though, so you won’t have to hold out for too long. The company also said its version of EMUI 5.0 will be specifically tailored for the US market, so it may be slightly different from Huawei’s flavor. You will get the new “eye comfort” mode at least, which removes blue light from the screen, as well as the ability to lock specific content with your fingerprints.

Now, for the main reason we’re even looking at the Honor 6x: Can a $250 phone have a dual-camera setup that’s not absolute garbage? The answer is a pleasantly surprising yes. The Honor 6x has a 12-megapixel RGB sensor and a 2-megapixel monochrome one to enable a wide aperture mode similar to that on the iPhone 7 Plus and Huawei Mate 9.

With this setting, you can get a soft, blurry background while keeping your subject in focus. In fact, to quote Honor, you can “bokeh all day”. During my testing, this worked well, although it requires some finesse. Your subject has to take up at least a third of the foreground for the effect to look good. You can also adjust the amount of blur you want in the image by adjusting a so-called aperture. You’re not really changing the lens opening here – you’re just using the software to mimic the effect you’d get from changing the actual physical aperture on a typical camera.

A picture taken with wide aperture mode activated on the Honor 6x.

Pictures without the wide aperture effect, including selfies with the 8-megapixel front camera, were generally vivid, accurately colored and sharp. But they’re not as eye-catching as the ones with wide aperture enabled, so I’d keep that feature on.

Like the Mate 9, the Honor 6x is powered by parent company Huawei’s Kirin CPU. But the Honor uses the less powerful octa-core Kirin 655 processor. It has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage onboard, which you can expand up to 128GB via microSD. Unfortunately, the unit we received had software that prevented benchmarking, so we weren’t able to test it, but the device felt responsive overall. However, it definitely doesn’t feel as smooth or zippy as the Mate 9 or the OnePlus 3T. I noticed some small delays in switching between apps and launching the gallery that I wouldn’t experience on a higher-end phone.

Honor also squeezed a 3340mAh battery into the 6x, promising 2.2 days of juice with average use and 1.5 days with heavy use. If those claims hold true, the 6x should be able to survive a full day without needing to be chained to an outlet.

Based on what I’ve seen so far, the Honor 6x’s greatest appeal is its surprisingly good dual-camera and wide aperture mode. Once its software is updated, the phone should be easier to use and more functional than it is now. Like most unlocked phones coming to the US from abroad, the Honor 6x will only work on GSM carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile (sorry, Sprint and Verizon subscribers). Honor is certainly the first company to offer a two-camera setup at this price, but it won’t be the last to do so. I’m still skeptical that a sub-$300 smartphone can deliver pictures that look as good as those taken with the iPhone 7 Plus, but this at least allows those with tighter budgets to achieve similar effects on their photos.

The Honor 6x will be available from January 4th in the US for $250 and Europe for £224.99. Those in America can get it for $200 during one of four flash sales, which makes the phone a much better deal.

Edgar Alvarez contributed to this report.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

ODG launches its Snapdragon 835-based mixed-reality glasses

The name Osterhout Design Group (ODG) might not sound all that familiar, but it has unveiled two mixed-reality smartglasses at this year’s CES. These new devices called the R-8 and the R-9 are two of the first wearables powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. They’re both capable of augmented and virtual reality overlays, though the R-9 has more sophisticated features to go with its higher price point. It has a 50-degree field-of-view, whereas the R-8 has a 40-degree FOV, and a 1080p resolution. Further, it functions as a development platform for mobile AR and VR, as well as smartglass applications.

A Qualcomm blog post that leaked yesterday revealed that the Snapdragon 835 chip reduces the lag between motion tracking and what you see on screen, lowering the chances of triggering motion sickness. It also improves positional audio for more realistic experiences. These features make the new smartglasses promising successors to the company’s R-7 headset, which you might have heard of if you followed Pokémon Go news last year: ODG created an unofficial port of Niantic’s game for the device back in mid-2016. The company’s experience goes back further than the R-7, though. In fact, that odd Mini AR goggles it created in collaboration with Qualcomm and BMW was based on an even older pair called (you guessed it) the R-6.

The good news is that the two new devices will be much more affordable than the $2,750 R-7. ODG plans to start shipping out the R-9 as soon as the second quarter of 2017 for $,1799. The R-8 will be available sometime in the second half of the year for under $1,000.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Source: ODG

Qualcomm wants to make smarter cars by sharing sensor data

You don’t need us to tell you that modern cars aren’t just cars. They’re places to surf the web and watch movies, and they’re getting smarter by the day. With the launch of its new Drive Data platform, Qualcomm is trying to add another big role to that list. As far as the company is concerned, modern cars are roving sensors too, and there’s a lot to be done with all the data they collect.

Let’s back up for a second. New cars will ship with loads of sensors, from really obvious ones like cameras and GPS to acceleration monitors and radar systems. They all serve valuable purposes on their own, but some interesting new features can be developed if the data they generate are placed in the right context. That’s where the Drive Data platform comes in: It uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820Am automotive processor to weave the data from all of those sensors together for interpretation. For instance, Qualcomm says its test hardware can use a car’s navigation, inertia and camera information to pinpoint its location to within about a meter.

So, what’s that kind of data actually good for? A lot, surprisingly. Qualcomm Auto’s Nakul Duggal told Engadget that mapping companies might be interested in location data crowdsourced from cars with the right hardware. That granular location information gets more valuable as car makers continue to add new sensors to their vehicles, too. Let’s say GM (or a company like it) tricks out a new ride with sensors that monitor temperature or pollution levels. When combined with all the other data the car is collecting, connected cars could feasibly be used to create environmental maps in real time.

Companies that deal with large fleets of cars, like car rental outfits or Uber, could also use this data to keep tabs on driver behavior and distraction. It’s not hard to imagine some companies going a little overboard about how it chooses to interpret some of this data, but for now, all we can do is wait and see. Remember, the Drive Data platform still in its early stages, and was designed to work with one specific kind of automotive processor. We’ve seen car makers like Audi embrace the platform for its 2017 cars, but it will be a while before this kind of smart data meshing makes it to the masses.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.