More than 3,900 companies are on hand to show off their latest technologies at CES this week, but there's one giant name that stands out from the pack: Google. This is the first time in several years that the Mountain View, Calif. CES is changing from a show where you show up with the flashiest gadget. Now there's a greater focus on creating partnerships between small and large companies to make each product work within constellation of others to help people get through the day more efficiently, said Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association, which hosts CES. Tech giants want their assistants to be the glue of that life operating system -- the voice that helps you turn on your lights, power your car's dashboard and control everything from your shower head to your bed.

Year to year, CES has a certain sameness about it: Intel's booth at the front, Sony's in the back and thousands of ginormous TVs in between. The topics and trends feel like the same things we've been talking about forever: Internet of things, smart home, autonomous vehicles, wireless everything. Is this really any different from last year? But turn the clock back just three years -- if not more -- and you quickly realize that the tech landscape of the past feels like a different planet. To that end, as we prepare to embark to Las Vegas, we've come up with 12 questions that we're hoping the world's largest technology trade show will answer -- or at least give us a clue as to where the world of technology will be headed in the next 12 months.

After a surprisingly robust 2017, our collective attentions now turn to the new year, and many questions arise as to what will happen in 2018. Some developments will likely be obvious extensions to themes or ideas that started to take hold over the past 12 months, but there are always a few surprises as well. Exactly what those unexpected developments prove to be is virtually impossible to foretell, but here's a reasoned look at some key themes I expect to drive important advances in the tech industry in 2018. As powerful and advanced as the tech products we use everyday may be, it's still a stretch to call them "intelligent." Sure, they can perform impressive tasks, but in many ways, they still can't do the simplest of things, particularly in helping us do what we "meant to do" or thought to do, as opposed to exactly what we told them to do.

With 2017 coming to an end, we can get a glimpse of what's yet to come in the next 12 months through the number of investments and product testing. It's no surprise that financial institutions were the first players to experiment with blockchain technology since 2014 and became active investors in the space that totalled $4.5 billion of funding in 2017. In the past few years, financial institutions were testing blockchain technology and working on proof of concepts. By 2017, this largely moved into production stages. In 2017, a group of 11 international banks developed a trade finance application using R3 technology.

Artificial intelligence and smart home assistants are expected to dominate the agenda at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), when it begins on Tuesday. One of the word's largest gatherings for the technology industry, the Las Vegas-based convention will see more than 170,000 people attend, looking to see the latest innovations from the likes of Intel, Samsung and Sony. But smart home speakers and the AI assistants that power them have been predicted to be the most widely discussed technology at the event, according to analysts, with Amazon and Google set to lead the way. Amazon has already announced new tools that will enable cooking appliances to connect to and be controlled by its virtual assistant Alexa, while dozens of start-ups and other firms are expected to showcase speakers and other devices compatible with Google Assistant, the internet giant's own AI helper. Industry expert Ben Wood, of analyst firm CCS Insight, said he expected a show awash with smart gadgets.

Google doesn't usually have a big presence at CES, but that's changed in a big way this year. You can't help but notice that the monorail circling the Las Vegas Convention Center bears huge letters saying "Hey Google!" Just below, Google has set up a huge, multi-story monument to the Google Assistant booth in convention center parking lot. It's still under construction so it's hard to say exactly what's going on in there. Even though Google hasn't done much at CES in recent years, it makes sense for it to make a big splash this year. Earlier this week, the company announced that it has sold "more than one" Google Home device per second since the Home Mini launched in October.

We're in the midst of a breakthrough decade for artificial intelligence (AI): More sophisticated neural networks paired with sufficient voice recognition training data brought Amazon Echo and Google Home into scores of households. Deep learning's improved accuracy in image, voice, and other pattern recognition have made Bing Translator and Google Translate go-to services. And enhancements in image recognition have made Facebook Picture Search and the AI in Google Photos possible. Collectively, these have put machine recognition capabilities in the hands of consumers in a big way. What will it take to make similar inroads in business?

It's been difficult to gauge how well smart speakers are selling outside of unofficial estimates, but Google just provided a clearer picture. The search firm revealed that it has sold "more than one" Home speaker per second since the Home Mini started shipping on October 19th. If you perform some back-of-the-napkin math, that suggests Google sold at least 6.4 million speakers between the Mini's debut and the end of 2017. Google hasn't split those sales by device, but it's safe to say that many (if not most) were Minis. The company added that Google Assistant is available on more than 400 million devices, including its own products as well as third-party Android phones, smart speakers, TVs and iOS devices.

Earphones and wearables are a natural fit for Alexa's next move. Google and Apple, Amazon's main hardware competitors in the voice assistant space, already have wireless earbuds, the Pixelbuds and AirPods, imbued with their own respective digital assistants. For now, however, Amazon isn't making audio hardware itself--it's letting third-party brands and manufacturers take charge of that task. Amazon has been testing and refining the kit with Bose, and the kit itself will be available more broadly later this year. Several other audio and mobile accessory makers have also begun integrating Alexa into their products, including Beyerdynamic, Bowers and Wilkins, Jabra, and iHome.

Analyst Gartner put out a 10-strong listicle this week identifying what it dubbed "high-impact" uses for AI-powered features on smartphones that it suggests will enable device vendors to provide "more value" to customers via the medium of "more advanced" user experiences. It's also predicting that, by 2022, a full 80 per cent of smartphones shipped will have on-device AI capabilities, up from just 10 per cent in 2017. More on-device AI could result in better data protection and improved battery performance, in its view -- as a consequence of data being processed and stored locally. Its full list of apparently enticing AI uses is presented (verbatim) below. But in the interests of presenting a more balanced narrative around automation-powered UXes we've included some alternative thoughts after each listed item which consider the nature of the value exchange being required for smartphone users to tap into these touted'AI smarts' -- and thus some potential drawbacks too.