Trailblazing AI tech
Artificial intelligence is rapidly being embedded in our gadgets – and bringing you features you actually need
While sci-fi books and movies have been exploring the idea of W artificial intelligence for many decades, in the last year AI has been thrust front and centre into the tech that we make use of every day. We’re now in a brave new world of AI, and there’s no going back.
The biggest catalysts for the way AI has exploded into the public consciousness have no doubt been ChatGPT and Dall-E, both developed by OpenAI: AI engines trained on vast volumes of writings and imagery, able to produce text and art that at times are almost indistinguishable from what a human being would come up with.
The ease with which these tools can be used, and the huge scope of their abilities, has made them two of the hottest properties in tech. They’ve also brought controversy along with the potential: worries that AI will steal jobs, choke the web with computer-generated content, and make our misinformation problem many times worse.
With those grey areas in mind, the AI we’re seeing embedded in hardware devices is easier to embrace and get behind. These are AI innovations that are genuinely useful, able to add extra powers and features to the gadgets we all rely on.
THE GADGETS
The Echo Show 8 isn’t a brand new product, but we’re including it here because Amazon has announced plans to add generative AI to Alexa at some point in the near future – think Alexa, but with ChatGPT-esque features as well. You can already chat to Alexa as if it’s a real person of course, but the upcoming update will make that virtual person more natural sounding, better informed and able to help with more tasks – as well as being better at learning your tastes and preferences and responding with them in mind.
£149.99, amazon.co.uk
1 GOOGLE PIXEL 8 PRO
Amid the latest wave of AI tech, Google is keen to remind everyone that it’s been busy on this stuff for a long time – Gmail has offered machine-written replies since 2017, for example. In the Pixel 8 Pro, there’s plenty of AI to talk about, such as instant language translations and call screening. But it’s the video and image creation tools that really stand out: AI is able to remove objects from photos, cut out distracting sounds on videos, boost images taken in low light, combine multiple images together and plenty more.
From £999, google.com
2 RABBIT R1
The compact, bright orange Rabbit R1 more or less stole the show at CES 2024, and it shows the potential of AI to create something completely new. It works a little bit like a phone, but rather than using apps to take photos, queue up music, search the web or book a holiday, you train AI to do it all
