It's been a banner year for the smart home, with new players and new products flooding the market. It's never been easier or less expensive to convert an ordinary home into a technological wonderland. The biggest developments have come with the widespread adoption of voice control, with Amazon's Echo family way out in front in terms of new products and third-party support. But the Noon Lighting System, which shipped late in the year, is easily the most exciting smart home product we've seen to date. We reviewed a lot of great products this year--and we encountered a few dogs as well--but this list represents our picks for the best of the best.

Inspired by Seth Louey I decided to share this list of virtual AI assistants for digital marketers. Hope you will find some useful assistants to carry out your marketing tasks. Spend less time coming up with content strategies and crafting social-media posts. Maisie's goal is to help you be more effective with your marketing so you can successfully grow your business. It's built for marketing, sales and others working on driving growth for companies.

A saying often heard from companies like Google and Microsoft is that they want to democratize AI. That's a nice word, democratize -- it's got "democracy" in it -- but it's unclear how these companies define democratization, and, like AI, it has an air of hype to it. Democratization in almost every context means delivering opportunities and benefits to everyone, but what exactly does democratization of AI mean to tech giants currently hoovering up much of the world's AI talent supply? Google chief scientist Fei-Fei Li has talked about it in relation to tensor processing units, and CEO Sundar Pichai in relation to AutoML, machine learning made to create machine learning. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes democratization as putting AI in the hands of "every developer, every organization, every public sector organization around the world."

By Sameet Gupte Customer experience (CX) has become the quintessential scale to choose between brands, and poor experience is a way of falling short in the buyer's journey to seamless interaction. However, over time businesses have begun to adopt and understand that a key component to building their CX strategies is around the customer. With rising expectations, the climb to the top is getting steeper in this rapidly evolving space. Each year there are predictions that CX will make the purchase decision easier and further improve the customer-business relationship. It has been rightly doing so with the increasing number of communication channels, CX metrics, and tools to support the point of contact.

Internet-connected lights, locks and laundry machines are close to becoming everyday household items, thanks in part to voice-activated speakers such as Amazon's Echo and Google Home. Market research groups are seeing increased sales of lights that turn off when you say'good night,' smart locks that let in your friends before you get home and similar smart-home gadgets. However, installing them could also be giving hackers a key to your home. As people get voice-activated speakers and online security cameras for convenience and peace of mind, are they also giving hackers a key to their homes? Many devices from reputable manufacturers have safeguards built in, but safeguards aren't the same as guarantees.

More than seven out of every ten marketers are trusting just one technology to make sense of all their challenges in 2018. And it just might succeed ... if it doesn't also take their jobs. Or if privacy regulations reduce the amount of data available to power it. Artificial intelligence is set to be the most transformative technology in marketing in 2018, according to more than 345 CMOs, CEOs, and marketing experts I surveyed recently. This past year, marketers learned that they had too much data. Too much to understand, and too much data to react to.

If you're in the market for a smart speaker, soundbar, or portable Bluetooth speaker, your decision process just got a little bit more difficult. On December 27, tech titan LG announced its full 2018 audio lineup, featuring a Dolby Atmos-enabled soundbar, a premium AI speaker with Google Assistant, and a line of life-proof, portable speakers built to withstand the elements. The LG ThinQ speaker comes with Google Assistant built in, so you can use your voice to inquire about the weather, answer nagging trivia, and control other smart home devices, among other things. LG is pushing the speaker as an accessory built to interface directly with its other SmartThinQ products, which range from refrigerators to air purifiers to Roomba-like vacuum cleaners. We don't yet know what sort of specs or pricing to expect; the ThinQ could be a competitor for the Amazon Echo around $100, or more of a Sonos-type solution in the $200 range, depending upon audio quality.

According to some dire and sensational headlines, many people will likely soon find themselves in the unemployment line, while a relative of a Roomba moves in to their office, taking over their old job. Few topics have created so much fear, uncertainty and doubt in the workplace as recent developments in robotics and artificial intelligence. As people welcome Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant into their homes and personal lives, they are beginning to wonder if the same technology that answers their questions and assists them in their day-to-day lives could soon replace them in the office and on the factory floor, doing the same work they did – but better, faster, cheaper, 24/7/365. Earlier this year, the Center for Leadership Insight at Russell Reynolds Associates set out to examine how management, finance and administrative workers spend their time at work. Looking at data on 103 different jobs, we classified a total of 1,880 tasks (the specific activities these workers undertake) based on the likelihood that each task would be replaced or disrupted by AI.

And just as we've seen over the past few years, more cord-cutting means more new streaming services, along with better devices on which to watch. Here's the best of everything that cord-cutting had to offer this year: Roku's Streaming Stick isn't the first 4K HDR device to hit $70--that honor went to Google's Chromecast Ultra last year--but it's by far the best value. The Streaming Stick combines Roku's fast and simple interface with a new remote that includes handy buttons for TV volume and power. Unless you feel like spending more than double on an Apple TV 4K or Nvidia Shield TV, this is the UltraHD streamer to get. Calling the Nvidia Shield TV a platform might not be fair, since it's based on the same Android TV software as several other smart TVs and streaming boxes.

LG is acting on its promise to unveil a slew of AI-powered gadgets at CES this January. The tech giant has unveiled a 2018 speaker lineup headlined by the ThinQ Speaker, a Google Assistant-powered device that promises "premium" sound alongside its smarts. It supports lossless high-resolution audio like LG's more advanced phones, and uses Meridian Audio's know-how to pump out "more natural and warm" music. The launch also hints that many of LG's newer appliances will be Assistant-savvy -- the company envisions turning on your air purifier with a voice command. The rest of the lineup is led by the SK10Y soundbar, a 5.1.2-channel