Nearly every booth / product we saw had voice as a feature for control. This is a big difference compared to last year, when voice and voice assistants were still being touted as an innovative and differentiating feature. While voice control is still very much in the early adopter phase for practical mass-market adoption, it was near ubiquitous at CES. Speaking of voice assistants, the big battle at CES 2018 seemed to be between Google's Assistant and Amazon's Alexa, and both companies took different marketing approaches at the trade show. Google opted for the brute force in-your-face spend a ton of money approach. Everywhere you looked, from the billboards on the hotels on the Strip to even the Las Vegas Monorail, Google showed up there.

After 51 years, CES in Las Vegas still manages to pack some surprises. No, I'm not talking about the rain that caused crazy floods or the two-hour blackout in Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I'm talking about 65-inch rollable OLED displays, robotic dogs, and $4,000 treadmills that deliver live workout classes on HD screens. There were plenty of less surprising, though no less welcome, innovations on display as well. I wasn't at all surprised to see voice assistance play a bigger role than ever this year, for instance.

This article originally appeared in Motley Fool. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already impacting our lives in many ways. From intelligent video curation on Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) YouTube and Google web search to Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) Siri personal assistant, AI is already making our lives easier. AI can also help corporations and customers fight against rapidly evolving cyberthreats. For instance, FireEye's (NASDAQ:FEYE) Helix cybersecurity platform is able to automate threat detection and prevention with the help of this emerging technology.

In August 2015, a number of carefully selected Facebook users in the Bay Area discovered a new feature on Facebook Messenger. Known as M, the service was designed to rival Google Now and Apple's Siri. A personal assistant that would answer questions in a natural way, make restaurant reservations and help with Uber bookings, M was meant to be a step forward in natural language understanding, the virtual assistant that – unlike Siri – wasn't a dismal experience. Fast forward a couple of years, and the general purpose personal assistant has been demoted within Facebook's product offering. Poor M. The hope was that it would tell users jokes and act as a guide, life coach and optimisation tool.

Local arts group Therefore already incorporates elements of theater, performance art and music into their work. Now creative director Dean Terry is adding artificial intelligence to the mix. For their latest show, the group will have scripted live interactions with home assistants such as Amazon's Alexa.

Your digital assistant goes through your calendar and talks to your other electronic devices to plan your day while you sleep. With an eye on your sleep cycles, it wakes you at a time in which you will feel most refreshed, within a window of time you've previously approved. As you get ready, your assistant reads you the news, reports, and social media activity it determined to be of most interest to you, based upon all it's learned from your schedules and communications. It updates you on the weather, upcoming meetings, and people you will see that day, and suggests the best time to leave the house based on traffic. Your assistant tells you that it has already ordered flowers for your sister's birthday (it knows that lilies are her favorite based on your previous purchases) and scheduled them for delivery that day.

The discussion of sexual assault and harassment are all the more paramount in an era dominated by the #MeToo and Times Up movement, but now there is a mobile dating application that is working towards making such complaints a thing of the past. Enter "Yes to Sex," a dating app created in 2016 that requests for an explicit sexual consent agreement to be made between both parties. The app, which is available for download through Apple's App Store and Google Play, requires users to verbalize the words "yes" or "no" before engaging in sexual relations with another user. The entire process is expected to take no more than 25 seconds, Yes to Sex's website claimed. "The media talking about consent is the first step in the right direction of making it the norm to verbally ask a potential partner straight-up every time, if they are interested," Wendy Geller, the app's president, CEO and inventor, told International Business Times.

There's no doubt that technology advances faster than we can even keep up these days, and the smart home sector is one of the fastest-growing. At CES 2018, hundreds of companies showed off new smart home solutions and gadgets, from the useful and innovative to the repetitive and uneventful. As we toured the showrooms, we noticed a few different trends coming to the table for smart home enthusiasts this year. Read on to learn more about where smart homes are headed and see how leading companies are tackling these new trends. Voice commands are great and all, but sometimes maybe you don't feel like shouting over your music or talking over an important scene in the movie you rented.

Who let the dog out? Sony rolled out a much cuter -- and more sophisticated -- Aibo robot dog on Tuesday, and it came off acting and moving a lot more like a real canine. The Japanese electronics giant retired the original Aibo in 2006 and went back to the lab to develop a 2.0 version. The one displayed at CES 2018 here has a new design that features expressive LED eyes and a vastly expanded range of movement, and is able to learn new tricks through real-world training. It is currently available only in Japan, but for roughly $1,760 and perhaps a little web magic, you can be the coolest person at the neighborhood dog park.

The former executive director of LSL Property Services, David Newnes, is one of the key backers of a new property management platform powered by artificial intelligence. Former TV Dragon James Caan and PropTech guru Faisal Butt are amongst other investors in AskPorter, which has now secured investment of over £500,000. AskPorter is a platform with an AI digital assistant that serves as a personal assistant for property managers and as a concierge for customers and tenants. The digital assistant'Porter' proactively carries out planned duties, guides customers through enquiries and reporting issues, and delivers concierge services, only reverting to a human manager or approved service provider when necessary. "This new technology has useful, practical applications that will add to and significantly improve the service that managing agents are able to offer landlords and tenants - both in AST and block management" says Newnes.