automation

Although Siri has been the first popular and widely known voice-controlled smart assistant, it has been shoved to the sidelines by the rapid expansion of the likes of Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. At WWDC earlier this month, Apple showed it still had some fight left. It introduced Siri Shortcuts and, more than just catching up with third-party integration, it’s going to change the game that will hopefully make smart assistant even smarter. But probably not before it shames its rivals.

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Production of Tesla's Model 3 has been a hot topic lately. From missing production goals to Elon Musk taking control of the process himself, whether or not Tesla can eventually scale to meet its own production goals has been given a lot of focus. Today, however, we're learning that Model 3 production has suddenly been halted, albeit temporarily.

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This week the folks at Walmart announced the arrival of a whole bunch more "high-tech pickup towers" at a number of stores across the United States. These giant towers appeared at just under 200 Walmart stores in the past year. Now the store is aiming to expand the program to "more than 500" stores by the end of this year. You might see this massive machine at your Walmart soon... very soon.

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Almost all of the major annual tech shows, like CES, MWC, and IFA, happen in the West, though, of course, their audience and exhibitors come from all over the world. There are, however, other equally big IT gatherings on the other side of the globe that also give important insight on the trends and developments in those regions. In two months’ time, Japan will be holding the country’s and one of the region’s largest trade show, Japan IT Week Spring, and its lineup shows just how much AI and IoT have spread throughout the world.

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As powerful and as smart at our smartphones are, they’re still pretty much like any other computer in our possession. We have to tell it what we want it to do and, most of the time, we do it manually and step by step. That’s definitely a great waste of time and a waste of the smartphone’s power. That’s where automation platforms come in. iOS has Workflow, now owned by Apple itself, and Android has Tasker, which is now on a surprise 70% discount for only $0.99. But what makes Tasker more than just a geek’s toy? Here are ten of the best ways you can use Tasker to remove the chore out of using your phone.

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Pizza company Domino's has yet again tapped modern technology to improve the pizza-ordering process, this time announcing a new partnership with IFTTT, making it the first-ever restaurant brand to get on the platform. To kick things off, Domino's has announced some IFTTT Applets able to work with the company's Pizza Tracker to adjust smart homes in optimal ways (for pizza delivery). Do you have sprinklers on outside, for example? They'll automatically be turned off when Tracker says the delivery is underway.

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The mobile app market looks so easy to get into but staying in the business is a whole different game. Never mind competing with rivals, sometimes you even end up competing with the very makers of the platform you're building upon. Many a popular app ended up that way (hello, Night Shift), so perhaps you can count yourself lucky when you're actually acquired by said platform makers. In that sense, the developers of Workflow are probably on Cloud 9 now that they have been bought up by Apple, though the long-term implications of the acquisition has yet to be seen.

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The folks at UPS said this week that they'd completed their first test of a drone launched from a truck. Of course this isn't the first time any drone has been launched from a truck, but it is the first time that a UPS drone has launched from a UPS truck with a delivery. This same drone delivered said package and returned to the truck while the driver continued on with their daily route.

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The brand new company Piaggio Fast Forward have introduced their first product: Gita, an autonomous miniature vehicle for luggage. At least, that's what the folks at Piaggio Fast Forward suggest Gita is, a vehicle - but it might be easier to understand as a suitcase that's able to follow its user around an airport. This suitcase is also able to move autonomously in a mapped environment, avoiding obstacles as they appear.

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Taiwan's Foxconn, the electronics manufacturing giant that builds Apple's iPhone along with dozens of other devices, has recently revealed its plans to eventually replace all the human workers in its Chinese factories with automated robots. This goal is to be accomplished over three phases, with 40,000 robots already in place on production lines, and a reduction of over half the company's workforce since the release of the iPhone 6 in 2014.

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The era of AI-driven automation is coming, and it'll bring great benefits for some and big drawbacks for others. The White House is expecting major economic impacts as artificial intelligence and automation become more ubiquitous, and today, it's outlining something of a plan of attack. Specifically, the White House has listed what it believes will be five economic impacts of AI-based automation, and three strategies policymakers can implement to address them.

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Apple is working with home builders like Brookfield Residents Properties to create showroom homes filled with Internet-of-Things gadgets, the end result being an automated home that shows potential homeowners the extent of what smart technology can do for them. These smart gadgets, as you'd expect, all work with Apple's HomeKit, and could prove a fruitful way for Apple to draw in new customers to iOS.

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