Yet the clear darling of this year's show was not a gadget but the growing amount of artificial intelligence software helping these products run. The race between Amazon and Google to be the go-to service for integration of consumer products was on full display. In many booths, signs prominently advertised that products worked with Google Assistant or Amazon's Alexa. The smart home, car and TV all seemed to have been touched by Amazon or Google. "It's the year of A.I. and conversational interfaces," said J. P. Gownder, an analyst for Forrester Research.

Court documents show Stephen Morreau, of Rhode Island, arranged to meet Kelleher-Mahunik at the motel in September. Morreau told investigators another man knocked on his motel room door, showed a badge and identified himself as an officer.

All new technologies bring with them new and sometimes unique security concerns. And while some of these concerns can be overblown by security vendors (and, let's face it, tech writers), a couple of recent news items regarding artificial intelligence (AI) raise some genuinely frightening prospects for enterprise IT security pros and enterprise employees. Item No. 1: AI soon may get crazy good at conversing with humans. Researchers at Osaka University have developed a method of dialogue that enables chatbots, voice assistants and other AI-powered platforms to learn information from humans that isn't already in their knowledge base. Right now voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Home, for example, learn from humans "by asking simple repetitive questions," the researchers write.

It takes only a few seconds to click a button and open a window on a computer. But for a busy doctor sifting through patient records, those clicks can add up to extra hours spent at a computer each day completing tedious but necessary tasks. Now, in response to doctors' demands for more efficient software, several companies that make electronic health record systems are offering a new tool: voice-activated virtual assistants. Think Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa, but for health care providers. Westborough-based eClinicalWorks, a large vendor of electronic health records, has launched what the company calls a first-of-its kind virtual assistant, named Eva, to help doctors and other care providers more quickly find patient information. Just like an Alexa user can stream music and ask for the weather forecast, a physician using Eva can order a prescription or ask for a patient's medical history.

Jefferson Graham reports from CES 2018, where this year, with hot new robots from LG and Sony, it looks like robots are poised to finally go mainstream. LAS VEGAS -- When LG, one of the world's largest corporations, brings a home robot to CES and places it smack dab in the middle of its mammoth booth here, you know something is up. So what if the debut of the South Korean giant's CLOi fell flat at a press conference? Early technology can be spotty, especially here where on-stage demos often can go south. Perhaps LG is early--very early, in wanting to bring robots to your homes alongside TVs, appliances and mobile phones.

In 2015, a black software developer embarrassed Google by tweeting that the company's Photos service had labeled photos of him with a black friend as "gorillas." Google declared itself "appalled and genuinely sorry." An engineer who became the public face of the clean-up operation said the label gorilla would no longer be applied to groups of images, and that Google was "working on longer-term fixes." More than two years later, one of those fixes is erasing gorillas, and some other primates, from the service's lexicon. The awkward workaround illustrates the difficulties Google and other tech companies face in advancing image-recognition technology, which the companies hope to use in self-driving cars, personal assistants, and other products.

In the Trump era, the desire for great sex appears to have taken a back seat to fears about lousy pillow talk. According to internal data the dating service OkCupid provided, its millennial users overwhelmingly care more about their partners' politics than how good they are in bed. In the nation's capital, 70% of millennials would prefer romantic partners who shared their political opinions than their sexual proclivities. In Chicago, Portland, Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the majority of millennials are more invested in a partner's position on climate change than their preferred position in the "Kama Sutra". Last year, we learned that younger millennials are having astonishingly little sex to begin with.

CES may be all about consumer electronics, but sadly that doesn't really include phones. Most companies hold off until the spring to unveil their newest handsets, and there hasn't been a big Android splash at CES since Google unveiled the Nexus One back in 2010. While the Intel-AMD love affair and Google Assistant-powered speakers might have snagged most of the headlines, Android fans still found enough cool things on the show floor to entertain them. Here's a look at eight things you might have missed: Lenovo's Moto Mods were all the rage a year ago, but the fad isn't completely over. During its keynote, Lenovo showed off two new magnetic Moto Mods for its Z2 Force and other Z phones: a long-awaited keyboard and a health monitor.

You won't have to use TiVo's in-house voice control to steer your DVR in the near future. TiVo has unveiled plans to add smart home integration, including voice control through Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. If you have a supporting device like your phone, an Echo or Google Home, you can control your DVR without reaching for the remote. PCMag describes the functionality as different depending on which voice assistant you choose. Alexa is more about straightforward navigation control, while the Google Assistant support is more about searching for shows and tying in with other devices (such as dimming the lights when you're ready to watch).

Emotion artificial intelligence (AI) systems are becoming so sophisticated that Gartner, Inc. predicts that by 2022, personal devices will know more about an individual's emotional state than his or her own family. AI is generating multiple disruptive forces that are reshaping the way we interact with personal technologies. Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner said, "Emotion AI systems and affective computing are allowing everyday objects to detect, analyze, process and respond to people's emotional states and moods to provide better context and a more personalized experience. To remain relevant, technology vendors must integrate AI into every aspect of their devices, or face marginalization." The current wave of emotion AI systems is being driven by the proliferation of virtual personal assistants(VPAs) and other AI-based technology for conversational systems.