A WIDE-RANGING COMPANY the South Korean company Samsung is best known to consumers for its smartphones and TVs But those are only some of the products Samsung produces At the Consumer Electronics Show CES in January 2018 the company put on view a wide range of new products and applications TVs software kitchen appliances speakers and medical devices were all on display TVS AND DISPLAYS One of the products that gained the most attention was a TV that Samsung called The Wall It had a whopping 146-inch 371 cm screen 1 The large screen was made up of smaller modules The number of modules can Virtual reality headsets were among the high-tech gadgets that Samsung showed off at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show 5
be increased or decreased to make the screen any size the customer wants Under bright light the edges of the modules could be seen but when the TV was turned on those edges disappeared All of the company’s new TVs have built-in voice control software which Samsung calls Bixby Introduced in 2017 it is similar to Amazon’s Alexa voice service and Apple’s Siri It lets people ask for their favorite shows learn about the weather turn on the lights or show photos Samsung’s TVs have other interesting new elements Now only one fiber-optic cable comes out the back Power and all audio-visual signals are carried through that mostly hidden cable Steam Link a system that enables games BIXBY AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Samsung’s personal assistant software Bixby allows its users to interact with other Samsung products including smartphones TVs and kitchen appliances Samsung is putting millions of dollars into hiring researchers to develop machines that learn what human users want and then perform those actions without being told to do so Artificial intelligence AI systems show some abilities similar to human intelligence They include planning reasoning learning problem-solving perception and the ability to manipulate objects AI is divided into two types narrow AI and general AI Narrow AI examples are vision recognition systems for self driving cars and the voice recognition of the Siri or Bixby virtual assistants Narrow intelligence systems can be taught or learn how to carry out a specific task General AI by contrast is true humanlike intelligence It can learn to do many different kinds of tasks It’s the kind of AI seen in science fiction movies and it does not exist yet in reality 6
the wall from computers to be played on a big-screen TV will be supported on all Samsung TVs The company also introduced a new 49-inch 124 cm computer gaming monitor that is responsive and sharp In an effort to help offices and maybe even classrooms go entirely paperless Samsung presented the Flip It’s a digital whiteboard that connects easily with phones and laptops This makes instantaneous collaboration between project partners in offices or schools possible The large screen can be set either horizontally or vertically Samsung is a major player in the large-screen TV industry 7
