Last year the average American spent more than 290 hours behind the wheel of a car – that's roughly equivalent to seven 40-hour weeks – according to a report published by the AAA Foundation. When you expand that globally, the amount of time we spend driving is staggering. That's why automakers like Renault-Nissan, Volvo, BMW and Toyota are embracing the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide new ways to help drivers stay safe, connected and productive during their time on the road. By 2020, 90 percent of new cars will have connectivity capabilities1 and Microsoft is helping the automotive industry drive this transformation. Today at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, we announced the Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, an offering built on the powerful Microsoft Azure cloud. It brings Microsoft's intelligent services in virtual assistants, business applications, office services, visual analytics and productivity tools to the car, to reduce driver distractions and help drivers be even more mobile.

Microsoft is finally bringing its Cortana digital assistant to Outlook mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. The Redmond giant is reportedly in the process of testing Cortana within Outlook, so a future update could soon bring this integration to all users. The Verge learned from sources familiar with Microsoft's plan for Outlook Monday that the company is in the process of integrating Cortana directly into Outlook apps. This means Outlook users will soon be able to use voice commands to control the popular personal information manager. For instance they could listen to and respond to emails using their voice.

If vintage video games don't soak up enough of your Monday, give Google's Song Maker a try. The interface is a big grid, in which each block represents a specific sound, whether its a melodic tone or piece of a drum kit. When you click play, a line moves across the grid, triggering each sound as it goes, which creates a musical loop. You can make some impressive and complex compositions if you know what you're doing. Of course, I made a total cacophonous wreck that sounds like a bunch of angry babies got loose in a Guitar Center.

Right now, my house is like a party for smart assistants. There are Google Home devices all over the place, a couple Amazon Echoes with Alexa thrown around, and even a Cortana in the kitchen. Shouting a "trigger phrase" in my home sometimes causes a cacophony of responses from every room. Siri, however, showed up fashionably late to the party in the form of the HomePod, which was originally scheduled for release at the end of 2017, but came strolling in here in 2018. The first wave of reviews rolled around and confirmed what most people suspected since its announcement: The HomePod is a great machine for music, but its streaming compatibility is too narrow and its smart home capabilities are too limited to compete with Google and Amazon who have headstarts measured in years.

David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow, wrote that promises of artificial intelligence (AI) magically performing intellectual tasks that humans do and dynamically learning as much as humans is "speculative at best." However with 2018 rapidly approaching, AI is clearly on the minds of many businesses. Where are businesses practically applying AI in their digital workplaces? In October 2017, Cearley noted at the Gartner 2017 Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, FL that Narrow AI currently holds the most promise. Narrow AI is composed of "highly scoped machine-learning solutions that target a specific task (such as understanding language or driving a vehicle in a controlled environment) with algorithms chosen that are optimized for that task," he says.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. In the age of digital assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home, turning on a light is as easy as saying "turn on the living room." Plenty of smart robot vacuums have picked up on this ease of use and are being built with Alexa connectivity, allowing you to bring an extra dose of laziness to the dreaded chore--and you can get a great one today at an amazing price. We spotted a discount on the EcoVacs Deebot N79S smart robot vacuum that you won't want to miss.

Microsoft is reportedly testing an integration of Cortana and Outlook mobile. Sources told The Verge that the company is working on a version of Outlook for iOS and Android that has Cortana built right in and would allow users to ask Microsoft's virtual assistant to read and reply to emails for them. With such an integration, you could, for example, ask Cortana to read you your emails or ask her to just read messages from specific people -- all of which would be very useful for people on the go.

In my first blog in this series, I stated my case that adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms will be the number-one technology trend of 2018. However, there are other important developments going on that are very close behind. Containers enable movement to the next level of virtualization. Container-based virtualization is the latest virtualization technology that will gain wider acceptance in 2018. Considered a new generation of virtual machines (VMs), which abstracted an entire device including the operating system (OS), containers consist only of the application and all the dependencies that the application needs.

If you have to deal with transcribing interviews as part of your daily work (like we do), you'll find a welcome partner in the new Otter app. Developed by former employees from Google and a speech-recognition veteran Nuance, Otter is a free service that transcribes speech on the go through the power of artificial intelligence (AI). There are a number of apps available out there, sure, but none seem to work like Otter -- and we're not even talking about the AI aspect yet. Most voice-transcription apps that are free aren't very accurate, and those that work really well are often too expensive. Additionally, none transcribe in "real-time" as Otter does.

Apple Inc.'s AirPods earphones have been a surprise hit. Now, the company is planning a push into the high end of the market. The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is working on noise-canceling, over-ear headphones that rival headsets from market leaders like Bose and even the company's own Beats by Dre brand, according to people familiar with the product's development. The company plans to launch the headphones as early as the end of this year, but has faced development challenges that might push back the release, the people said. Work on the Apple headset has been on-and-off over the past year.