Lisa Lacy is a reporter who covers digital and search marketing. Despite millions of orders for voice enabled devices, vendors have yet to map the uncharted territory of voice enabled search and advertising. Indeed, as voice search expands -- to the tune of 50 percent of all searches by 2020 (according to some estimates) -- so, too, do opportunities for platforms to cash in beyond products and services. In fact, in an earnings call last year, Google acknowledged voice search will drive industry-wide change, but it did not detail its plans. These devices are already in a massive (and growing) number of American homes.Amazon's Black Friday weekend sales saw millions of orders for voice-enabled devices that could help generate $10 billion in additional revenue by 2020, split evenly between device sales and shopping, according to investment bank RBC Capital.

"I have FOMO for the future", says Sam Lessin. That's why his startup Fin is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter.

It's unsurprising that connected-home technologies and virtual assistants should both be expected to mature after the learning technologies, given the former rely heavily on artificial intelligence, which in turn relies almost completely on the latter.

And it wasn't just the weekly political dramas, sexual harassment scandals or a massive security breach that affected nearly half the population that had us down. There was also a slew of terrible consumer devices that sullied our mood this year. Before we say goodbye to them, though, let's relive the horror one last time. Here's hoping that 2018 brings us better gadgets than this sorry lot. Even though Juicero technically debuted in 2016, it wasn't until 2017 that it met its epic end, and it's for that reason we're naming it one of the worst gadgets of the year.

Were you lucky enough to get a new iPhone for the holidays? Well, here are some things you should know about your new Apple phone. You've come to grips with the fact that Apple removed the standard headphone jack on recent iPhone models and bought the company's branded $159 wireless AirPods. Or maybe you received these Bluetooth headphones as a holiday present. Either way, you'll want to make the most out of these small earbuds, which I frequently use and like a lot.

The Echo family of smart speakers is central to Amazon's consumer-facing deep-learning technology. Did you just unwrap a shiny, new Amazon Echo device? Or maybe you already have one and you're getting a little tired just streaming endless hours of holiday music. You might already know that Alexa can convert teaspoons to tablespoons, time the food you put in the oven and tell jokes you can repeat at work. But the digital assistant in Amazon's Echo speakers is capable of so much more.

Could robots change the way we think? While that might seem the stuff of dark science fiction, New Zealand artificial intelligence (AI) experts say there's real fear that computer algoritms could hijack our language, and ultimately influence our views on products or politics. "I would compare the situation with the subliminal advertising that was outlawed in the 1970s," said Associate Professor Christoph Bartneck, of Canterbury University's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, or HIT Lab. "We are in a danger of repeated the exact same issue with the use of our language." Bartneck has been working in the area with colleague Jurgen Brandstetter and other experts at the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour and Northwestern University in the US.

During Apple's fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts, CEO Tim Cook said, "AR is going to change everything." Augmented reality (AR) is shaping an entirely new paradigm for mass technology use. We've quickly evolved from typing on our PC keyboards, to the point-and-click of the mouse, to the smartphone's tap or swipe, to simply asking Alexa or Siri to do things for us. Now AR brings us to the age of holographic computing. Along with animojies and Pokémon and face filters, a fresh and futuristic user interface is emerging.

In this paper, we propose a unified framework and an algorithm for the problem of group recommendation where a fixed number of items or alternatives can be recommended to a group of users. The problem of group recommendation arises naturally in many real world contexts, and is closely related to the budgeted social choice problem studied in economics. We frame the group recommendation problem as choosing a subgraph with the largest group consensus score in a completely connected graph defined over the item affinity matrix. We propose a fast greedy algorithm with strong theoretical guarantees, and show that the proposed algorithm compares favorably to the state-of-the-art group recommendation algorithms according to commonly used relevance and coverage performance measures on benchmark dataset.

Last year, we saw VR surge in prominence, but our picks this year are more conventional -- not to mention more diverse. The usual suspects include the iPhone X and Surface Laptop for getting helping us get things done, and the Nintendo Switch and the Sonos One for their ability to let us luxuriate at home and on the road. There's some more unexpected stuff on our list, too, like the easy-to-use DJI Spark drone as well as the Mighty, a tiny music player that won over much of the Engadget staff. Ultimately, we appreciated these picks for the ways they made our lives more pleasant, even if only a little. Apple's latest iPhone is a radical departure from the company's tried-and-true smartphone formula, but you'd better get used to it.