Tony is a Geek

https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/20/ibm-watson-assistant/ IBM's Watson-based voice assistant is coming to cars and smart homes This all sounds very familiar :-D http://tonyisageek.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/ibm-bmw-and-iot.html ......... One of IBM's first partners Harman will demonstrate Watson Assistant at the event through a digital cockpit aboard a Maserati GranCabrio, though the companies didn't elaborate on what it can do. In fact, IBM already released a Watson-powered voice assistant for cybersecurity early last year. You'll be able to access Watson Assistant via text or voice, depending on the device and how IBM's partner decides to incorporate it. So, you'll definitely be using voice if it's a smart speaker, but you might be able to text commands to a home device. Speaking of commands, it wasn't just designed to follow them -- it was designed to learn from your actions and remember your preferences. If you allow the Watson-powered ap

This is something close to my own heart and something I'd like to get more involved with in the future. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/ai-detects-papaya-ripeness I like the idea that the robot harvesters can use Visual Object detection and then Recognition to examine the fruit and determine if it needs picking - how it does that picking raises an eyebrow, but mixed with robotic arm and pressure sensitive 'finger' tips and some good coding it'd be feasible. Then, in the grocery shop as a customer, you can whip out your phone, scan the fruit on the shelf and it can "highlight" which fruit will ripen when, allowing you to get the best choice of fruit to meet your needs.  ie. do I want to eat it today? actually, I want to eat 3 of these in 3 days time, which are the best 3 to select? sounds all very cyberpunk....

Frank, I doff my cap to you Sir, awesome find and very relevant!

Meet CIMON: http://fortune.com/2018/02/28/ibm-cimon-robot/ Called CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), the new crew member is about the size of a medicine ball and will work alongside human astronauts in space. The “floating brain” is equipped with IBM’s  Watson artificial intelligence technology  and is expected to assist astronauts during the European Space Agency’s Horizons mission in June.

very minor update, but great fun along the way.... As previous shared, I setup an RPi3 with ROS and was about to move into the coding of ROS nodes .  Whilst that was okay...it involved me having to use Python and whilst I see it's really useful to use, it's not my native tongue.  That is JavaScript...has been client & server-side since about 1998, so it's my go-to comfort first choice. So rather than attempting to port everything in my head into Python and then into ROS nodes, I thought I would do what I needed to do: "to get it to work" and then I'd look at porting it over. What did that require?  Well, installing NodeJS and npm on the RPi3 for one.  Dead easy and simple to do. Oh, I forgot to say what it is/was I wanted to actually achieve!  okay, I want to be able to SHOUT at T1ll13 and for her to always be listening via a microphone ( no trigger "Alexa" or "Google" words for me ), to convert that Speech to Text, then s