Artificial Intelligence is beginning to have transformative effects on consumers, enterprises, and governments around the world. The impacts are contributing by automating repetitive task, creating efficiencies, ubiquitously improving user experience, and creating ways for humans to improve our cognition. Furthermore, by 2020, the AI market is projected to reach $70 billion, driven by increasing computational power and improving approaches/applications with machine, deep learning, natural language processing and robotics and many a number of other technologies. To gain a better understanding of the perception of AI in the US, PwC surveyed 2,500 consumers and business decision makers. The objective is to better understand their attitudes towards artificial intelligence, and the future implications on business and society.

Artificial intelligence is big news at the moment, with pretty much every company claiming that its latest product is powered by AI. Some of these products are genuinely useful, while others are fairly ludicrous (we're looking at you AI toaster), but we're undoubtedly heading into a world where our lives are increasingly augmented by some kind of digital assistance. And while that prospect might be an unsettling one, especially for those worried that their job might be at risk from the rise of automation, there are some major benefits to augmenting our own brain power by embracing a little artificial intelligence. Here we're going to look at the artificially intelligent technologies that we're already using to make our lives easier, and taking a look forward to where we might end up as machines keep getting more intelligent. One of the easiest examples for most people to understand as an AI is your digital assistant.

Lest you doubt that Google is serious about spreading its AI. to every nook and cranny of the consumer electronics universe, consider today's CES 2018 reveal: Google just announced four new "smart displays" from Lenovo, JBL, LG and Sony, plus a bevy of smart speakers and TVs from other partners, almost too numerous to mention. And all these devices come with Google Assistant baked in. This is a shot across the bough of Amazon, whose Alexa digital assistant is appearing in more and more third-party devices, as well. Google also announced that Google Assistant is coming to Android Auto dashboard units, and gave an official name--"Actions"--to all the commands and queries you can voice to Google Assistant. But the big news centers on smart displays, which offer capabilities you won't find in Google's own Google Home, Google Home Mini or Google Home Max smart speakers.

Lenovo's Smart Display puts Google Assistant on 8- and 10-inch touchscreens. The result is a smart-home sidekick that adds a visual element to all the rich A.I. features we've already seen in the Google Home smart speaker. Announced Monday night at CES and due to ship around July, it's still too early to see how well Lenovo's Smart DIsplays will compare to Amazon's Echo Show (which earned high marks in our TechHive review). The hypervigilant Google product managers who orchestrated our briefing carefully focused the demo around what the Smart Displays could already do well, and shied away from features where the kinks were still being worked out. In short, I was allowed to try only specific, pre-vetted tasks (more on my experiences below).

At last year's CES, among the biggest technology conferences of the year, it felt like you couldn't turn a corner without hearing about Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant. This year, Google is hoping to make sure that doesn't happen again. The search giant, which typically doesn't exhibit products at CES (formerly the Consumer Electronics Show), is making a slew of new announcements about the its own virtual helper, the Google Assistant, at this year's conference. Google revealed that the Assistant is coming to a variety of new devices, including new voice-activated speakers, Android-powered TVs, headphones, and cars that support Android Auto. The new Google Assistant-compatible speakers will be made by companies such as Bang & Olufsen, Altec Lansing, Anker Innovations, JBL, and iHome, among others.

Hogar Controls has unveiled the Google Assistant-powered Milo Smart Home Speaker with a built-in home hub that supports the Z-Wave Plus and Zigbee home automation standards. The versatile device can get you the news and weather from Google's AI, stream music across Bluetooth and WiFi, and control your blinds, lights, locks, thermostats and other devices via the hub. Other features include a touch controller, a three-microphone array that allows voice recognition even when you're not close to it, a speaker with a 2-inch driver plus dual two-inch passive radiators for "clear highs and deep bass," and an aluminum and fabric design, in light gray or black. Hogar said the Milo is the first-ever smart speaker with Z-Wave Plus, but Toshiba recently released its own smart speaker/hub combo, the Symbio, with that feature (the Symbio also includes a camera). Nevertheless, the products highlight a bit of a trend at CES this year to put home hub features in smart speakers, since they're often sitting in a central spot in your house.

This CES, the company has more substantial changes to reveal. The new Thinkpad X1 series now come with microSIM card slots and e-SIM technology, so they'll remain "always on, always connected," per Microsoft's marketing language. The X1 Carbon laptop and X1 Yoga convertible are also the first PCs announced to sport screens with Dolby's Vision HDR technology, and feature built-in privacy shutters for the webcam. All three X1s are also equipped with twin far-field microphones that can hear you from up to four meters (about 13 feet) away, so you can shout at Cortana from across the room if you wish. At my demo here in Vegas, the Thinkpad X1 Yoga was able to hear me and Lenovo's reps from at least 12 feet away.

Last year Sony kicked off the year by adding OLED and HDR to its lineup, then later pushed Google's Assistant AI as an upgrade for its Android TV platform. In 2018 the company is sticking to those basics on its latest 4K TVs with a few tweaks. It will once again offer OLED TVs in 55- and 65-inch sizes, this time with an updated version of its technology that broadcasts sound directly from the display itself. Now dubbed "Acoustic Surface," this A8F series appears to pack the upgraded version of Crystal Sound that LG Display is showing off, with support for 3.1 channels of audio instead of the A1E's 2.1. There's no word yet on price, but last year's models launched at $5,000 and $6,500, and currently sell for around $3,000/$4,000.

Google is at CES in a big way this year -- no, seriously -- and it's mostly centered around one product: Google Assistant. The search giant is incorporating its personal assistant AI into more devices than ever. They run the gamut from smart speakers (some of which have displays), smart earbuds and yes, even cars. If CES 2017 was the Alexa show, then CES 2018 just might very well be the Google show. "We think Assistant is more useful if it's available across all devices and contexts," said Scott Huffman, Google's VP of Engineering in charge of Google Assistant. "It's not just phones or speakers or laptops; it's all kinds of things."

While Amazon might have been the first to come to market with a smart display -- the Echo Show and the Echo Spot, respectively -- it's now no longer the only ones. At this year's CES, Google is announcing a slew of smart displays from several companies, and one of them is the JBL Link View from Harman International. Think of it as a Google Home, but with a touch screen. Measuring 13 by 5.9 by 3.9 inches, the overall Link View looks a bit like a halved football, but with a display set in the middle. That display measures 8 inches across and features a HD 1280 x 720 resolution.