The Home Hub is Google's first own-brand smart display, combining Google Assistant, advanced smart-home control and a digital photo frame into a neat and tidy package. Google isn't the first to market with smart displays. Amazon's Echo Show put the company's Alexa on a screen a year ago, while Google Assistant smart displays made by Harman, Lenovo and LG were released a few months ago. But Google's Home Hub is slightly different. Firstly, it doesn't have a camera on it, which Google goes to great lengths to repeatedly tell you in the hope you will find it less creepy and feel more comfortable putting it in places like your bedroom.

The "smart display" wars are taking off, which means it's time for consumers to ask themselves that modern existential question: Do I need another screen? That's what I was wondering while sitting in the bedroom of a Google employee, whose chic San Francisco home was being used as the backdrop for demos of the company's new Home Hub device. Major tech companies, one after the other, have launched voice-controlled touchscreen gadgets that are meant to live on your kitchen counter, nightstand or living room table. And Google Homes product manager Ashton Udall was showcasing what this particular one does when you wake up and say, "Okay, Google. At this prompt, Google's virtual assistant voiced a greeting, announced the time and weather, then provided an assessment of how bad the commute would be that day. Meanwhile, the bedroom shade -- one of the 10,000 or so smart devices that can sync with the Home Hub -- automatically rolled up. When the assistant is done going through reminders or previewing events on the Google Calendar, it might launch a news reel. This one had been programmed to segue into classical music instead. "In the morning, you're stumbling out of bed, you're getting the cobwebs out of your head," Udall said. "I don't have to go into my phone … You can start just listening." Smart displays, though their capabilities vary, are not replacements for handheld devices. They're meant to be shared. The Home Hub is in many ways a smart speaker with a 7-in. Yet supplanting those handheld devices is a value proposition that Google employees emphasized when I asked why people need this, as if the smart display would function as a Plexiglass partition between me and my smartphone -- servicing many of my basic needs and desires without exposing me to distracting, endless notifications. "The way we designed this is it's there.

Machine Learning is not something that comes to the arena just last year or few. There are so many Machine Learning applications, we take only five to show you that how important it is to follow this trend, and it is not something new.

Google debuted its take on the smart display earlier this year with a slew of Echo Show rivals. This is, after all, the Google way. As it did with Android, Google created the ecosystem and then partnered with third-party companies like Lenovo and JBL to make the actual products. However, as with the Pixel and the first run of Google Home products, Google likes to dabble in hardware, too. That's why it wasn't much of a surprise when Google announced the Home Hub -- its very own spin on the smart display.

Imagine if we could call out to our living room TV to access a show or movie, get step-by-step cooking directions, watch YouTube clips on demand, have it double as a digital photo frame, look up anything in the world, make phone calls and run your home automation system. How cool would that be? That's the promise of Google's new Home Hub, a $149 talking speaker that is taking on Amazon's $229 Echo Show in what's expected to be one of the biggest marketing battles of the holidays. How small is the Google Home Hub? So tiny that the Amazon Echo dwarfs it, and Mr. Jinx the cat towers over it.

Google brings video to the talking speaker category with the new Google Home Hub. USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham explains why the device has potential. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Google brings video to the talking speaker category with the new Google Home Hub.

Facebook's ad targeting and the subsequent data collection strategies have already enraged users. Recently, we learned how Facebook stretches out its authority over phone numbers used for two-factor authentication by the users, for ad targeting. And now, Facebook seems geared up to collect users' data through a brand new method. This time, it may use its latest launch Facebook Portal, for the purpose. Facebook Portal is an amalgamation of smart camera and home assistant technologies. The camera repositions itself and zooms automatically, using AI, to keep a moving person in focus.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may seem like a sci-fi but AI machines can do some pretty amazing and impossible stuff which humans will never be able to. Today, Artificial Intelligence is changing every aspect of technology. Nowadays, technology is not just about creating tools for practical purposes, it is much more advanced. AI is the latest example of it. From self-driving cars to playing chess, AI has outperformed humans in each and every task with its high tech new, time-tested tools.

Actually, most people have very little knowledge of how artificial intelligence works, or for that matter, how broadly it is used in everything from daily financial transactions to determining your credit score. Take the stock market, for example. Only a tiny amount of trading on Wall Street is carried out by human beings. The overwhelming majority of trading is algorithmic in nature. It's preprogrammed so that if the price of soybeans or oil goes down, all kinds of additional steps will take place.

"Alexa, what's the weather going to be like today." It's taken decades for scientists to understand natural human speech to the point where voice-activated interfaces such as Alexa, the natural language processing system by Amazon, are sufficiently enabled to be successfully accepted by consumers. Alexa is who talks to users of Amazon's Echo products including the Echo, Dot and Tap, as well as Amazon Fire TV and other third-party products. Even since 2012, when the patent was filed for what would ultimately become Amazon's artificial intelligence system Alexa, there has been tremendous growth in capabilities and the credit for that growth goes to machine learning. For something that we do every day without giving it any thought, conversation between machines and humans is complex.