Story by John Brandon, Venture Beat
Almost every gadget you use in the near future will benefit from AI. We’ll continue using Alexa on speakers like the Echo, but even a fan in your living room will use AI to control the temperature. The lights will notice when you pull a book off a shelf and will brighten in the corner of the room where you like to read. A coffee maker will use machine learning to make adjustments based on your taste preferences.
It will happen, and it already has with several new products. One that stands out is called Meeting Owl, a $799 device that sits on a conference room table and can automatically determine who is talking. It uses machine learning to understand not just who is speaking, but if there’s a conversation between two people and whether the videoconferencing chat should show two or more views for the video. It’s all on the fly, as well. And the device doesn’t need to be pre-programmed (setting how many people are in a room, for example).
