With the growing popularity of smart speakers and voice assistance tools offered by first-tier Internet service providers, many have focused on the development of emerging home devices. But for UnlimiterHear, which develops audio solutions, it sees the potential of integrating voice assistance functionality into mobile devices such as Bluetooth earphones and speakers. UnlimiterHear expects the new smart Bluetooth earphones and speakers to be able to gradually replace traditional Bluetooth earphones and speakers.Digitimes recently had a chance to sit down with UnlimiterHear chairman Kuo Ping Yang and CEO Tony Huang to talk about the business opportunity of the voice-assistance products and the company's latest operations.Q: What kind of company is UnlimiterHear?Yang: UnlimiterHear is an intellectual property (IP) holder and currently owns 140 audio-related technological patents. Our main business model is to license the patents to clients including chip designers and makers as well as brand vendors of audio products such as earphones and speakers.In addition to the licensing business, we offer modularized ICs and total solutions that have already integrated our audio technologies and cloud computing support, and provide customizable in-house designed apps to help satisfy clients' specific demand.Q: What product lines does the company currently have?Yang: Our businesses can be summarized into two major categories: the healthcare and the consumer, while Bluetooth mobile earphones and speakers are currently our largest business.For the healthcare sector, our technologies are mainly implemented into two major products: hearing aids and hearing protection devices, while for the consumer area, we have the EarCommand technology, designed for voice assistance-supported devices and can be used in products including smart speakers and earphones and the EarEQ technology that can personalize a speaker or earphone's frequency output to best suit the user's hearing.We are also developing a new technology that can provide real-time oral translation via voice assistance platforms.Huang: For the EarCommand, the technology is designed primarily for portable devices particularly Bluetooth earphones and speakers, and supports short-distance voice recognition. Users simply need to press a button on their earphones or speakers to begin the voice recognition process and the recorded voice will then be transmitted to the app on users' smartphones via Bluetooth and then send to voice-assistance platforms provided by first-tier Internet service providers.Our app is able to support several different voice assistance platforms including Amazon's Alexa and China-based IFlytek's voice assistant tools. Since Bluetooth speakers and earphones have a much higher usage rate than traditional speakers, we believe the product line will have a strong potential in the upcoming years.Our IC modules all support Bluetooth communication and are certified by the official standard organization. We also provide several customized firmware to support different kinds of applications. Currently, our IC module business is mainly seeing orders from the healthcare market and the solutions are primarily used in hearing aids.Q: What is UnlimiterHear's view on the Bluetooth earphone and speaker market?Yang: The trend that we are seeing in the market is similar to feature phones' competition against smartphones.Feature phones, which were the original mainstream of the handset market, eventually lost their ground to smartphones and are now mainly in the entry-level sector due to smartphones' better functionality and diverse usages.The same thing is also occurring to Bluetooth earphone and speaker products. The "feature" Bluetooth earphones and speakers will be replaced gradually by new-generation "smart" Bluetooth earphones and speakers and our technologies will become one of the key drivers for the transformation and help traditional earphones and speakers become smart and accelerate the replacement trend.Q: What are UnlimiterHear solutions' advantages?Yang: Traditional Bluetooth earphones and speakers' key usage is to transmit audio wirelessly, but our technologies are able to further enhance their functionality, allowing the devices to support apps and personalize their hearing frequency for specific users with EarEQ.We began our business four years ago developing Bluetooth hearing aids and designed apps to implement our technologies. Seeing the emerging voice-assistant business opportunity in the Bluetooth earphone and speaker sector, we decided to put our technologies into these mobile product lines to help create added values.Huang: As far as we know, we are so far the only solution provider that is integrating the voice assistance function into Bluetooth earphones.For our clients, they have many options for adopting our technologies into their products. They can purchase our chips or procure solutions from our chip partners including CSR and Microchip and get a license from us.Although we are the first player to offer short-distance voice assistance-support Bluetooth solutions in the market, we still see rising competitions from other IP developers. However, our experience in developing hearing aids has given us advantages in the competition.Our technology is able to filter out noises and collect only the user's voice and will then send the voice through Bluetooth to our app on a smartphone for the software to transmit the voice to third-party voice assistance platforms.This technology is exclusive from our development of hearing aids. There are not many earphone vendors able to come out with such a profound sound technology. What we are trying to do is to implement our professional-level hearing aid technologies into consumer products to create added value.With a clear voice, our technology is able to receive a faster response from voice assistance platforms and also more accurate answer.Our Acoustic Algorithm Simulation System (AASS) also played a major role in improving voice assistance platforms' responding time. With our AASS, time spent from asking a question to receiving an answer can be shorten by over 25%, which is expected to greatly improve user experience.UnlimiterHear chairman Kuo Ping Yang (right) and CEO Tony Huang (left).Photo: Joseph Tsai, Digitimes, December 2017

Shipments of handsets by Taiwan's brand vendors and ODMs reached 22.9 million units in the third quarter of 2017, up 11.2% sequentially and 85.3% on year, according to Digitimes Research.Handset shipments from ODMs posted a significant growth in the third quarter, buoyed by orders from HMD Global (Nokia) to the Foxconn Group. However, shipments from brand vendors remained flat in the September quarter as compared to a quarter earlier, Digitimes Research noted.Also thanks to orders from HMD Global, the Foxconn Group ranked the number one supplier of handsets in the third quarter, while HTC and Asustek Computer tied for second place.Total handset shipments by Taiwan's makers are expected to reach over 24 million units in the fourth quarter of 2017 as orders from HMD Global still remain strong and HTC and Asustek are ramping shipments of new models.Foxconn will continue to be the top supplier in the fourth quarter, followed by Asustek, HTC, Arima Communications and Compal Electronics.

In view of fast growing demand for automotive lithium (Li)-ion batteries arising from increasing global sales of electric vehicles, Japan-based makers of Li-ion battery materials are expanding their production capacities, according to Digitimes Research.Asahi Kasei, Ube Industries, Toray and Sumitomo Chemical are major suppliers for insulation materials, and Ube Industries, Mitsubishi Chemical and Mitsui Chemical focus on electrolyte products. Meanwhile, Nichia, Nippon Denko and Sumitomo Metal Mining deal with cathode materials and Hitachi Chemical sells mostly anode materials.Asahi Kasei has revised upward its annual production target for insulation materials to 1.5 billion square meters by 2020, up from 1.1 billion square meters set previously in 2016.Ube Industries and Mitsubishi Chemical have set up two electrolyte joint ventures with total annual production capacity of 15,000 tons in China. Mitsubishi Chemical, in particular, will expand its production capacity for ethylene carbonate, a material of electrolyte, in Japan, while also considering setting up a second factory overseas.Sumitomo Metal Mining will invest JPY18 billion (US$160 million) to expand its monthly production capacity for cathode materials from 1,850 tons currently to 3,550 tons in January 2018.Hitachi Chemical plans to set up a anode factory in the US mainly for Gigafactory, a super-large Li-ion battery factory set up jointly by Tesla and Panasonic in Tennessee.According to Japan-based Techno System Research, the global market value for Li-ion battery materials is expected to reach JPY1.81 trillion in 2020, increasing 2.4 times from the level in 2015.

According to Gartner, 2020 will be a pivotal year in AI-related employment dynamics as artificial intelligence (AI) will become a positive job motivator. AI will create 2.3 million jobs in 2020, while eliminating 1.8 million.The number of jobs affected by AI will vary by industry: through 2019, healthcare, the public sector and education will see continuously growing job demand while manufacturing will be hit the hardest. Starting in 2020, AI-related job creation will cross into positive territory, reaching two million net-new jobs in 2025."Many significant innovations in the past have been associated with a transition period of temporary job loss, followed by recovery, then business transformation and AI will likely follow this route," said Svetlana Sicular, research vice president at Gartner. AI will improve the productivity of many jobs, eliminating millions of middle- and low-level positions, but also creating millions more new positions of highly skilled, management and even the entry-level and low-skilled variety."Unfortunately, most calamitous warnings of job losses confuse AI with automation - that overshadows the greatest AI benefit - AI augmentation - a combination of human and artificial intelligence, where both complement each other."IT leaders should not only focus on the projected net increase of jobs. With each investment in AI-enabled technologies, they must take into consideration what jobs will be lost, what jobs will be created, and how it will transform how workers collaborate with others, make decisions and get work done."Now is the time to really impact your long-term AI direction," said Sicular. "For the greatest value, focus on augmenting people with AI. Enrich people's jobs, reimagine old tasks and create new industries. Transform your culture to make it rapidly adaptable to AI-related opportunities or threats."AI has already been applied to highly repeatable tasks where large quantities of observations and decisions can be analyzed for patterns. However, applying AI to less-routine work that is more varied due to lower repeatability will soon start yielding superior benefits. AI applied to non-routine work is more likely to assist humans than replace them as combinations of humans and machines will perform more effectively than either human experts or AI-driven machines working alone will.By 2022, one in five workers engaged in mostly non-routine tasks will rely on AI to do a job."Using AI to auto-generate a weekly status report or pick the top five emails in your inbox doesn't have the same wow factor as, say, curing a disease would, which is why these near-term, practical uses go unnoticed," said Craig Roth, research vice president at Gartner. "Companies are just beginning to seize the opportunity to improve non-routine work through AI by applying it to general-purpose tools. Once knowledge workers incorporate AI into their work processes as a virtual secretary or intern, robo-employees will become a competitive necessity."Leveraging technologies such as AI and robotics, retailers will use intelligent process automation to identify, optimize and automate labor-intensive and repetitive activities that are currently performed by humans, reducing labor costs through efficiency from headquarters to distribution centers and stores. Many retailers are already expanding technology use to improve the in-store check-out process.Through 2022, multichannel retailer efforts to replace sales associates through AI will prove unsuccessful, although cashier and operational jobs will be disrupted.However, research suggests that many consumers still prefer to interact with a knowledgeable sales associate when visiting a store, particularly in specialized areas such as home improvement, drugstores and cosmetics, where informed associates can make a significant impact on customer satisfaction. Though they will reduce labor used for check-out and other operational activities, retailers will find it difficult to eliminate traditional sales advisers."Retailers will be able to make labor savings by eliminating highly repetitive and transactional jobs, but will need to reinvest some of those savings into training associates who can enhance the customer experience," said Robert Hetu, research director at Gartner "As such most retailers will come to view AI as a way to augment customer experiences rather than just removing humans from every process. "While many industries will receive growing business value from AI, manufacturing is one that will receive a massive share of the business value opportunity. Automation will lead to cost savings, while the removal of friction in value chains will increase revenues further, for example, in the optimization of supply chains and go-to-market activities.In 2021, AI augmentation will generate US$2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity.However, some industries, such as outsourcing, are seeing a fundamental change in their business models, whereby the cost reduction from AI and the resulting productivity improvement must be reinvested to allow reinvention and the perusal of new business model opportunities."AI can take on repetitive and mundane tasks, freeing up humans for other activities, but the symbiosis of humans with AI will be more nuanced and will require reinvestment and reinvention instead of simply automating existing practices," said Mike Rollings, research vice president at Gartner. "Rather than have a machine replicating the steps that a human performs to reach a particular judgment, the entire decision process can be refactored to use the relative strengths and weaknesses of both machine and human to maximize value generation and redistribute decision making to increase agility."

Tesla had sold 233,856 electric vehicles (EVs) and deployed 948 Supercharger stations with 6,426 charging piles in total around the world as of September 2017, and as the company is expected to sell 800,000 EVs cumulatively by the end of 2018, it has to expand Supercharger stations with 25,000 charging piles in total in 2018.The ratio of the number of cumulatively sold EVs to the total number of charging piles at Supercharger stations fell from 62.3 in 2013 to 36.4 in September 2017 and will further drop to 32 by the end of 2018 if Tesla realizes the expansion, Digitimes Research estimates.While charging piles at Superchargers have power output of 145kW to enable 20-minute charging for running 250km, Superchargers need connection to power grids of high voltage and amperage and enough ground space for EVs to stay for charging. As an alternative, Tesla has deployed destination chargers each with power output of 20kW at commercial facilities such as hotels, restaurants and shopping centers. Cost for installing a set of destination chargers at a location is much lower than that for setting up a Supercharger and they complement each other. As of June 2017, Tesla had installed 5,886 sets of destination chargers around the world.In addition to Superchargers and destination chargers, Tesla has offered a battery swap program to allow EV owners/drivers to exchange batteries at swap stations, with the entire process fully automated. Battery swap takes much less time than charging at Superchargers but costs much higher. Tesla is also developing wireless charging through cooperation with a technology development company. However, there have not yet been common international hardware specifications for battery and wireless charging and therefore there is not significant demand for battery swap and wireless charging for the time being.

The South Korea government has set an ambitious goal to grab a larger pie of the global 5G market as it calculates that its 5G hardware and software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of only 75.6% during the period from 2020-2026 against a much faster pace of 148% projected for the global 5G market for the forecast period, according to Digitimes Research.Aiming to become one of the members of the leading group of the global 5G industry, Korea's telecom operators will begin to try out its 5G networks in 2018 and push the 5G networks into commercial operations in 2020 before integrating its 5G services with other applications such as AR/VR, AI, autonomous driving, smart city, disaster relief and healthcare in 2022.Korea's telecom operators, led by Korea Telecom (KT), have already implemented 5G demonstration networks at the main venues of Pyeongchang Winter Olympics to begin its 5G trial operations.The Korea government also plans to raise R&D ratios for related 5G developments, to pursue hyperlinks and low latency for its 5G networks during the forecast period; it aims to reach a 5G maximum transmission speed of 20Gbps, a latency of one millisecond and a maximum of one million connected devices per square kilometer of the networks.

The growing popularity of all-screen smartphones is playing a role in easing global oversupply of handset displays, as the production of 18:9 panels will consume 12.5-20% more production capacity than that for 16:9 ones, according to Digitimes Research.Recent capacity ramps for handset panels by a number of panel makers from their 6G lines and the gradually saturating smartphone market in China has raised concerns about oversupply of small- to medium-sized LCD panels.All major flat panel makers in China have stepped into the production of 18:9 panels with the bulk of their output being consumed by smartphone vendors in the Greater China area. Notably, Global HMD also plans to launch all-screen models, designed by FIH Mobile. Oppo and Vivo have rolled out models using HD (720p) 18:9 displays, while other vendors are using all-screen displays for their flagship models.However, 18:9 panels are hardly to completely replace 16:9 panels in the short term as smartphones equipped with 16:9 panels are still the mainstream models outside China. Nevertheless, prices of 16:9 panels have been rising since July 2107 as panel makers have continued reducing the production of such models.

With the popularity of the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) networks growing at a pace slower than expected in part due to the difficulty in securing sufficient spectrum resources, a growing number of telecom operators including AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, Deutsche Telecom, NTT Docomo and China Mobile, have paid more attention to the development of unlicensed spectrum technologies and related applications, according to Digitimes Research.While the number of new subscribers to 4G LTE services globally is expected to still hit a new high in 2017, the overall growth of subscribers to 4G LTE services has been slowing down, said Digitimes Research.In particular, the number of LTE-A networks in use, which are being implemented since mid-2011, accounted for only 33% of total LTE networks as of the third quarter of 2017, registering an increase of only 12pps compared to the same period of 2014.Digitimes Research believes that a lack of an effective and profitable business model for data services by mobile operators and an insufficient supply of 4G spectrum resources has resulted in lower-than-expected popularity of the LTE-A networks. Some iconic 4G LTE operators in the US, Japan, China and Korea have seen stagnant or even declining earnings from related sectors although their 4G revenues have continued to grow.Furthermore, some countries are still operating 2G, 3G and 4G networks simultaneously, which also limits spectrum resources available for 4G LTE services, delaying the deployments of LTE-A networks.

Global TFT LCD panel makers are expected to be able to accelerate the development of profiled all-screen panels to compete more effectively with the single dominating AMOLED all-screen panel vendor, Samsung Display, leveraging their improved technology and increasing output from 6G LTPS LCD and 6G-8.6G IGZO LCD production lines in the Greater China area, according to Digitimes Research.While also seeking to land AMOLED panel orders from Apple, a number of AMOLED panel suppliers, including LG Display, Japan Display (JDI) and Sharp, will continue to lose out such orders to Samsung Display at least in the first three quarters of 2018 as their developments of AMOLED panels have been slower than expected.However, it is highly likely that TFT LCD panel makers will be able to continue to maintain their share in the high-end smartphone panel segment as they have managed to improve the curved edge effects of their TFT LCD profiled panels, while screen burn-in will continue to be a common issue with OLEDs, which happens particularly after long-term use.

Voice-controled smart speakers has seen slower-than-expected demand in the Japan market, Digitimes Research has observed.Google Home and Line Clova Wave were launched in the Japan market in October 2017, followed by Amazon Echo in the following month, Digitimes Research indicated. The Japan market has lagged behind other main markets in launch of smart speakers because development of Japanese-language-based speech recognition and synthesis took much time and quite a large portion of Japanese consumers are reluctant to use speech-based control functions in front of other people.Japan-based Sony, Panasonic and Onkyo unveiled in-house-developed smart speakers at IFA 2017 taking place in Berlin, Germany, during September 1-6, with these models based on either Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa for speech recognition. Toppan Printing has adopted in-house-developed speech recognition technology for AISonar, a smart speaker for commercial use to guide customers at banks.