This year will finally deliver the benefits of Deep Learning to mobile platforms. We expect significant improvements in privacy, personalization, offline functionality and cost of services across all mobile application segments. Alexa, Cortana and Siri will soon live on our phones, answering questions, translating and being helpful even when we're traveling abroad or hiking off-the-grid. Video games will become more entertaining, challenging and engaging even when we play against the computer. Video streaming will take less of our bandwidth and mobile data, while the image quality will improve.

STD and HIV cases have increased nationwide and gone up and down California. And Long Beach now has the state's second-highest rate of chlamydia and third-highest rates of gonorrhea and syphilis. No one factor explains the increases, but health officials point to the popularity of online dating apps, casual hookups and evidence that young people who are busy and otherwise healthy often don't bother with condoms or routine checkups.

As society hurtles towards ever more unbelievable feats of technology, it's no wonder that some people feel it nearly impossible to keep up. The trajectory of digital technology is on a path of exponential growth and is not predicted to stop or decline anytime soon. To protect your business from falling to the wayside in the wake of more technologically oriented companies, it is a good idea to investigate the ways you can embrace up and coming technologies in order to improve and make more money. One aspect of new tech that seems to frighten people the most is the advancement of artificial intelligence. Here are six reasons you should ignore this reservation and adopt AI as the useful business tool it can be.

We are no longer in the dreamland of sci-fi when it comes to artificial intelligence; the technology has finally turned real. In fact, without conscious awareness, humans are slowly becoming depended on the technology that it will be hard to live without AI in few years to come. Research claims that by mid-January 2018, 39 million plus Americans owned at least one smart speaker, something that highlights how common citizens interact with AI-based gadgets, more than initially anticipated. Amazon's Alexa, Apple HomePod, and Google's Assistant speakers are literary our assistants, as they can now do amazing tasks, from answering common questions, shop on our behalf -to giving commends on what beverages seem best for us. As it is with any other technology, artificial intelligence is still evolving, and the goal is to attain fully self-driven intelligent machines that will use their brains without human influence at any point in their existence -after being trained.

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and a spectacular start to the New Year! Yes, 2017 should have received a speeding ticket, since it went by too fast! And, I'm sure, 2018 will similarly speed along at an unsuitable pace – apparently time flies when you're having fun, or is it just old age? So, it's 2018, and I thought in this month's column I would steer away from the traditional diet of "Here are my predictions for 2018." To be honest, I simply couldn't swallow writing a piece of this ilk, as I'm sure plenty of others will have their own unique perspective.

Take note, though, that your speaker won't wait for a follow-up if it's in the middle of playing music or audiobooks. You'd have to talk clearly and audibly, otherwise it won't be able to separate what you're saying from background noise. You can also ensure that Alexa won't think that you're issuing follow-up commands when you're talking to someone else by ending the conversation: simply say "stop," "thank you," "cancel" or "go to sleep." If this sounds useful, because you pepper Alexa with questions and tasks, just fire up the voice assistant's app and head to Settings. Select the device you want, scroll down, toggle on the mode and you're good to go.

If you've ever downloaded a dating app, chances are someone has already told you that you need to see the Black Mirror episode, "Hang the DJ," which takes the idea of algorithm-driven dating to a whole other level. For the uninitiated, Black Mirror is a sci-fi series of standalone stories about mysterious, alternative worlds, that double as critiques on society, like a modern-day Twilight Zone. And if you really haven't seen any of it yet, DID YOU NOT SEE THE SPOILER ALERT ABOVE? Call it professional bias, but I loved "Hang the DJ," which was released on Netflix a few months ago. The episode was both strange and a grotesquely familiar interpretation of the direction our romantic futures are headed--as in, straight into an AI-powered supercomputer compiling data about our entire lives.

All across the western world, Google Homes and Amazon Echoes of all shapes and sizes were welcomed into consumer homes with open arms. For personal use, these assistants can tell you the time, keep your appointments, and search the web when you have your hands full – and their capabilities growing by the day with each new input and request. Many are starting to ask what they won't be able to do in the future. In the business world, the story is similar, if not quite as visible yet. More and more companies, especially within the finance sector, are exploring what AI can do for their business, to either plaudits or scepticism from employees and the general public.

Whether or not virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa actually make our lives better is debatable to say the least. Is navigating the myriad of voice cues really faster or more convenient than just tapping on your smartphone screen a few times? Whichever side of the issue you fall on, it's clear that AI is here to stay, so the European Space Agency is planning to embrace it with a fancy virtual assistant of its own and it's headed to the International Space Station this year. The new AI is the product of a partnership between Airbus and IBM and it's called the Crew Interactive Mobile Companion. That's not a terribly catchy name, so they just call it CIMON (pronounced "Simon," I assume) for short and it'll be put through its paces by astronaut Alexander Gerst.

In 2015, 1.7 million voice-first devices were shipped across the U.S. But the number soon rose up to 6.5 million in 2016. The increase in the trend captured the growing demand for voice-search in the coming years. Voice-search technology has existed for many years but its evolution has just begun. From automated voice recognition phone system to simplified voice to text dictaphones, voice technology was adopted in different forms all across the globe.