The Mobile World Congress (MWC) is primarily a gathering for the bigwigs of the telecoms industry, but far from the main thoroughfares of the vast conference there are always hidden tech gems.
Among the most offbeat products spotted at last week’s event was artificial intelligence (AI) clone technology.
As advertising slogans go, “you can live forever” is up there with the best.
Photo: Reuters
That is how Memori Yamato described the “personalized AI clone” from her Japanese company Alt Inc.
“Your descendants can continue to speak and interact with you, even after your death,” Yamato said.
The idea is to upload as many videos, images and audio samples as you can while alive.
Photo: Reuters
The system would use that data to generate an AI mirror, cloning you in the digital world.
“It will look like you, it speaks in your voice and it even thinks like you,” she said.
The idea has been nine years in the making, and feedback from early users suggests the technology has nailed appearances and voices, she said.
NOSEPRINT
A dog’s nose carries similar identifying traits as a human fingerprint. South Korean start-up Petnow Inc took this information and ran with it — like a dog after a stick — to create a biometric database of pets based on noseprints rather than microchips.
“Since the 1940s, we’ve known that dogs’ noses worked a little like fingerprints,” Petnow business development manager Peter Jung said.
About 100,000 animals are abandoned each year in South Korea, often because owners cannot afford vet bills, he said.
“Less than 10 percent have chips because people don’t like the process,” he said.
Petnow just requires a photo and AI does the rest, ensuring the photos are good enough for identity purposes.
Jung said that 50,000 pet owners have signed up since last year, and he hopes the government will change the rules to allow his system to replace chips.
Cat lovers need not worry.
Their noses might be too petite to be identifiable, but each feline face is unique and can be used in the system, the company said.
TAKING FLIGHT
A staple from the pages of science fiction and the dreams of the superrich, flying taxis could be available as soon as 2025, SK Telecom Co said.
At the MWC, some attendees got an early taste, thanks to virtual reality headsets and a prototype complete with juddering seats.
Halfway between a helicopter and a drone, the craft has six electric motors that allow vertical takeoffs and landings.
It can carry up to four passengers and move at speeds of up to 320kph.
South Korea’s biggest telecoms provider developed it with Californian start-up Joby Aviation and hopes it will solve congestion in South Korea’s cities without adding to global warming.
“In Korea, in urban areas, we have severe traffic congestion, but constructing a mass transportation system like a highway or subway needs many social costs,” SK Telecom manager Ken Wohn said.
“Using this UAM [Urban Air Mobility] service can shorten our customers’ travel time without making so much infrastructure,” he said.
NEVER ALONE
People might live their later years in the company of “socially intelligent” robots capable of “building an emotional relationship” with them.
That is the vision of Spanish technology outfit Eurecat, which has developed a robot called NHOA — or “never home alone.”
It is designed to reduce the loneliness of older people living at home.
The orange and white robot stands 160cm tall and can be controlled with a touchscreen and by voice.
Eurecat healthcare innovation manager David Mari said the aim was not to replace human relationships, but to “humanize” the applications and connected objects used by older people.
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
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
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],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts