We may have lost the company payroll on the casino floor but that doesn't mean we don't still have a day of great events coming live from the CNET stage. You'll find us outside of the Tech West area at the Sands Expo Center. Can't join us here in Las Vegas? No problem: We're bringing our final day of live programming to you right here. Be sure to catch up on the highlights from the show floor while you're here and head over to our dedicated CES homepage to find out about everything that happened here in Sin City.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is science that deals with building intelligent machines that can think and respond like a human. It holds exceptional future opportunities in digital marketing. The impact of AI and machine learning goes far beyond the mundane. More and more, organizations are leaning on AI for cutting-edge applications with at least one of three overarching benefits. As a business owner or marketer, it is time to identify the problems that your business is facing and how accurate insights can solve these issues. Gathering all the data spread across numerous applications into one place will help you get accurate insight.

Although conversational AI has been in the headlines for years now, B2C applications of this technology are still in their infancy. I believe that's going to change this year, and we're going to see conversational interfaces replace more websites, mobile apps and contact centers than ever before -- even as the burgeoning industry faces new challenges. I work with large enterprises looking to add conversational AI to their customer experience, so I've seen the signs that a boom is on the way. One strong indicator is the amount of funding pouring into the space. We've seen a growing number of VCs investing in conversational AI startups, with some luminaries -- like the founder of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son -- focusing almost entirely on AI.

As marketers, we need to battle now like never before to catch our customer's attention. The average person in the US goes through more than 6 hours each day interacting with some kind of digital media. With ever growing interplay over the variety of digital platforms comes a diminishing customer attention span. Doubtlessly, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is a testing job to fill. A year ago, we witnessed a portion of the world's greatest marketers cut digital advertising spending by over $100 million, which saw no impact on sales development.

A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. LAS VEGAS – The Google team is seemingly everywhere at CES 2019, both in signage at the main convention center, ("Hey Google"), a large booth presence and hundreds of people dressed in white "Hey Google" jumpsuits, topped off with matching "Hey Google" beanies. Arch-rival Amazon, on the other hand, has a small, understated ballroom at the lower trafficked Sands Convention Expo, showcasing a potpourri of products, from Amazon and other vendors, that use the Alexa voice commands. Staffers are adorned in blue Alexa sports shirts. On the eve of the show, the companies threw down the gauntlet: Amazon Echo speakers and third-party vendors using the system have sold over 100 million units, Amazon said.

With Smart Home technology taking off and smart home assistants (like Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple Siri) becoming more prevalent in homes the start of a new home technology revolution is underway. Homeowners can monitor and control the house heating and cooling systems, security systems, door locks, garage doors and more all from where ever they have access to internet on their smartphone. Artificial intelligence (AI) will add to that ability by allowing decisions about the home to be made without the need of direct input from the homeowner. For instance a trusted dog walker walks up to the front door during their scheduled time to take Fido out for a walk. The dog walker's face is seen via camera which an artificial intelligence assistant recognizes and knows they are there during the correct time and allows the door to be unlocked so Fido can enjoy some outdoor time while the homeowner is away.

Cruce Saunders This is "Towards a Smarter World," and I'm your host Cruce Saunders. Very pleased to be joined today by Elizabeth McGuane, who is the content strategy lead at Intercom where she is part of the product design team, and owns the language of the core product including its messenger app. Elizabeth's been working in UX for 10 years and before that was a journalist. I'm really glad she could be with us today. She recently wrote an amazing article to check out on TechCrunch, called "On Bots, Language, and Making Technology Disappear." Elizabeth, with that article, would you summarize some of your thinking behind how you ended up arriving the conclusion that actually naming a bot is not necessarily the best strategy? We did it through research, but I think where we started was through a really careful and considered approach to testing the language. When I started, this was one of the first projects I worked on at Intercom when I joined just over a year ago, and we were looking at introducing bot-like, very simple bot, into our messenger. We make a B2B messenger, so not to get to complicated in terms of the UX of our product, but we always have to think of our users in terms of two layers: we have our customers and then our customers' customers, and we were really creating a bot that businesses would use to communicate concepts or to get data from their customers. I knew that we need to be really careful about how we express things so that we would marry with the business' tone of voice so that we wouldn't be overstepping the bounds of what we could say on their behalf. I had a feeling, and this was really just my gut instinct, that having a very chatty personality would not necessarily marry with the tone of voice of every single business that wanted to use our messenger. It was a very practical consideration on that front. When we went into testing, we tested with a name and without out a name. We also did testing with different tones of voice because going into this I think the design leads were interested to see whether a more friendly tone of voice or a more functional tone of voice would work. That was the initial consideration of "let's just try different kinds of copy, and see what works." I felt that I wanted to take a more structured approach and try names, no names, functional, more friendly, then we also tried with a pronoun, without a pronoun. Once we realized that names didn't work we also tried removing the first person "I", and removing an introduction so that the bot didn't say, "Hi, I'm so-and-so's digital assistant," or what have you to see what impact that had. That's really where it started was with an actual structured approach to research.

Voice assistants are being integrated into every part of our daily lives, from smart speakers to home security and bizarrely, even to toilets. Google said it expects its Assistant to be installed on a billion devices soon, and Amazon recently announced that more than 100 million devices with Alexa have been sold. So Amazon's number isn't a billion (it isn't on millions of Android phones, after all), but support for Alexa continues to be built into more and more products, thanks in part to the Alexa Gadgets Toolkit launch last year, which gives developers APIs and technical documentation to make gadgets that can pair up with an Alexa device. Ahead, some of the more intriguing Alexa-enabled products spotted at CES 2019. LG's futuristic rollable TV is coming to market, with a refined base station and a 100-watt Dolby Atmos speaker.

Hello future, you are weird. At least it is here at CES 2019, the tech industry's biggest annual conference. It's where companies big and small come to launch gadgets and test new ideas. Not all of them make it to stores. But there's an eternal optimism that technology can solve, well, almost any problem -- even ones you never knew you had.

Amazon's latest low-cost Alexa-powered smart speaker, the third-generation Echo Dot, looks better, sounds better, but still costs the same budget-friendly £50. When the second-generation Echo Dot launched in the UK it had very little in the way of competition. Having everything that was good about Amazon's Alexa voice assistant squeezed into a smaller package half the price of the bigger Echo, it was a no-brainer. But now the Echo Dot has some stiff competition from Google, in the form of the £50 Home Mini and its Assistant, and Amazon's own second-generation Echo, which is now only £90. The Echo Dot is Amazon's small, puck-like smart speaker with the firm's Alexa voice assistant built in. New for the third generation is a softer, more rounded aesthetic with fabric sides.