Huawei P20 Pro wins ‘Best Photo Smartphone’ from TIPA World Award 2018

First impressions of the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro

For the second year in a row, the TIPA General Assembly has recognized Huawei for its smartphone camera efforts awarding the P20 Pro this time around as the “Best Photo Smartphone.” According to TIPA Chairman Thomas Gerwers, ““The new P20 Pro, developed in cooperation with Leica, is an amazing milestone in the development of smartphone devices for high-quality photographic imaging.”

This smartphone is considered to have the world’s first triple-camera system with what is considered from this generation as having the highest pixel count available for a smartphone with with f/1.8, f/1.6 and f/2.4 wide aperture. It has a 40MP RGB sensor, a 20MP monochrome sensor, and an 8MP sensor with an optically stabilized 3X telephoto lens. Huawei promises you get the best low light photos with the P20 Pro and combined with its homegrown artificial intelligence system the phone recognizes over 500 scenes in 19 categories, making sure you get the best photos you can from any scenario.

Google pauses development of Allo, focuses on Android Messages

With Google Allo not picking up as people’s messaging app of choice, the tech giant has decided to take a step back from developing the app. According to Anil Sabharwal, Google’s new head of the communications group, the have decided to “pause investment” on Allo and have the team focus Android Messages. Their team is putting all of its resources that it can in the development of tis Rich Communication Services, specifically the service it’s calling Chat. This is Google’s latest effort to create a messaging service that can rival iMessage and other big messaging apps like Facebook Messenger.

At the moment, Google will continue to support Allo. It hasn’t decided yet what to do with the app. According to Sabharwal, they just needed the team to support Android Messages as soon as possible. But he adds, “We want to do right by users. We want to make the right decisions here, and we don’t want to rush anything.”

Source: The Verge

Huawei developing virtual assistant that provides ‘emotional interactions’

Warner Bros.

If you’ve seen the 2013 film Her, you have a bit of an idea what Huawei is working on in the virtual assistant space. The Chinese company is said to be developing a new assistant that will “provide emotional interactions.” Huawei’s Vice President of Software Engineering Felix Zhang talked to CNBC about this. He said, “We want to provide emotional interactions. We think that, in the future, all our end users wish [that] they can interact with the system in the emotional mode. This is the direction we see in the long run.”

The company is hoping users would want to keep interacting with its assistant so they don’t feel as alone, similar to what happened in Her. Now, whether this is something users really want is probably the more important question. What do you think?

Microsoft celebrates Earth Day by empowering anyone to protect the planet

Microsoft is putting the power of the cloud and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to the service of the environment on Earth Day 2018. In its blog entry titled "Microsoft celebrates Earth Day with new way to enable anyone to protect the planet," the company outlines some ways its technology is helping the planet.

• How the Snow Leopard Trust is doing that now. The Snow Leopard Trust is tasked with protecting the fewer than 7,000 snow leopards left in the world – and they see AI as a critical piece of this important work.
• The Microsoft Green blog offers up profiles of some leading grantees doing work on biodiversity, and you can check out a new map of our more than 60 AI for Earth grantees working across more than 20 countries, or even apply for a grant if inspiration strikes.
• A  story about iNaturalist. With more than 8 million logged observations, this army of citizen scientists is changing the way field research is done. Now with Microsoft Azure and AI, iNaturalist is making it easier for both amateur and professional scientists to close the knowledge gap on biodiversity and enable precision conservation.

Find out more here.