Microsoft Corp is looking forward to teaming up with Taiwanese partners as part of its plans to develop “connected cars” that recognize voice commands, a company executive said yesterday.
Samuel Shen (申元慶), chief operating officer at the Microsoft Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group, said the Redmond, Washington-based firm has developed a prototype of a connected car using the “Cortana” voice-recognition virtual assistant of the Windows 10 operating system.
The Cortana-connected prototype also has its windscreen integrated with a navigation system, allowing the virtual assistant to show the location of the driver’s nearby preferred locations on the windscreen or make restaurant reservations, he said.
“We have not launched similar products due to the high cost, but we hope to have further discussions with Taiwanese partners to jointly explore future possibilities,” Shen said during his opening keynote speech at the TechDays Taiwan developer conference in Taipei.
He did not mention the names of any potential partners, nor did he set up a timetable to develop Cortana-based connected cars.
Microsoft demonstrated its “Windows in the Car” concept in April last year — extending the functionality of a Windows Phone directly into a built-in car display — as its answer to Apple Inc’s “CarPlay.”
TechDays is an annual Microsoft industry event for software development, software architecture and IT solutions in Taiwan. This year’s conference attracted more than 3,000 IT professionals from nearly 1,000 firms.
The event includes sessions about the intelligent cloud platform, the Internet of Things suite with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, Windows servers and the commercial applications of the Windows 10 operating system.
Microsoft said that more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500 companies have at least one Microsoft enterprise cloud service.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day