Vehicles made by Korean carmakers Hyundai and Kia will include built-in virtual assistants with AI-powered smarts beginning in 2019 (via Engadget). The plan to build smart assistants into vehicles will make use of tech created by SoundHound, the music identification company that has recently been focusing more on building AI agent software more akin to things like Siri and Google Assistant. The assistants would be able to do things like suggest destinations based on what's next in your calendar, or based on your past preferences and choices. They could also offer remote car and smart home control using voice commands, and do Alexa-like stuff including providing news and weather. The so-called Intelligent Personal Assistant will get its official debut at CES this year, which is coming up in a couple of weeks – but it's aiming to begin testing in actual cars on actual roads starting in 2018, with a broad ship window of 2019, as mentioned.

If we told the average person in early 2013 that someday it was going to be very important to learn the correct way to greet your devices, the average person might have thought we'd gone mad. It wasn't that people didn't love their gadgets in the distant wilds of five years ago; nor did the idea of talking to a digital intelligence sound completely outside the realm of normal experience. In 2013, the world had been acquainted with Apple's Siri for almost two years, and Google's first crack at a smart, voice-activated assistant, "Google Now," was released in mid-July 2012. But the idea of voice-activated artificial intelligence (AI), capable of fulfilling more than very simple commands -- and, in fact, being able to "converse" in real-time with a human, recognize a user's voice through biometrics and develop more skills over time so it could gradually "learn" to do better -- seemed literally the stuff of science fiction or superhero movies. The idea that there would not only be that type of AI in the market, but that there would be so much of it out there that users would need to learn a variety of different "wake" commands to initiate conversation with their devices?

Abraham Lincoln once said, "The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time." Winston Churchill once said, "If you're going through hell, keep going." And, "Never, never, never give up." As we look back at top cyber stories and security trends in 2017, these wise words from fearless leaders who have gone before us certainly apply to cybersecurity and the new 21st-century challenges confronting our world in 2018. Last year we started with, "You ain't seen nothing yet!"

Hyundai and Kia both have reputations as early adopters of in-car tech, and that's truer than ever now that voice assistants are becoming a practical reality on the road. The Korean automakers have revealed that they plan to include AI assistants in their new cars starting from 2019, with every vehicle being'connected' by 2025. As Hyundai explained, they've been working with SoundHound to create an Intelligent Personal Agent (based on Houndify) that both makes proactive suggestions (such as reminding you of a meeting) and offers remote control of both your car and your home. This sounds a whole lot like what other voice assistants do, but the car brands are counting on support for "multiple-command recognition" as the ace up their sleeve. If you tell your car to check the weather and turn on the lights at the same time, it'll do both instead of scratching its head like so many other AI helpers.

Perhaps you've been hearing strange sounds in your home--ghostly creaks and moans, random Rick Astley tunes, Alexa commands issued in someone else's voice. If so, you haven't necessarily lost your mind. Instead, if you own one of a few models of internet-connected speaker and you've been careless with your network settings, you might be one of thousands of people whose Sonos or Bose devices have been left wide open to audio hijacking by hackers around the world. Researchers at Trend Micro have found that some models of Sonos and Bose speakers--including the Sonos Play:1, the newer Sonos One, and Bose SoundTouch systems--can be pinpointed online with simple internet scans, accessed remotely, and then commandeered with straightforward tricks to play any audio file that a hacker chooses. Only a small fraction of the total number of Bose and Sonos speakers were found to be accessible in their scans.

We all know that getting a new car can be an exhilarating experience for the buyer -- from the "new car smell" to that first getaway road trip that we all dream of. But there's no denying that some aspects of the car-buying process are sub-optimal and truly frustrating for car buyers. Since every dealer wants to deliver the best experience for their customers, my firm recently commissioned a survey to learn more about the realities of the car-buying process. We explored attitudes and pain points and also sought to understand more about how automation can improve the car-buying experience. The issues that consumers experience when it comes to buying a new car are significant to our industry because roughly one in five Americans (some 19 percent) have bought a new car or truck in the past year or plan to buy one in the coming year.

Martin Puryear is head of curriculum and technology at Coding Dojo, a 14-week coding bootcamp that teaches full-stack development. Last January I wrote a TechCrunch post predicting the major programming trends of 2016. But in the software development world, things can change very quickly. It can be difficult to see the high-level trends clearly through all the chatter about shiny new development languages, frameworks and tools. So, as we near the end of 2016, how accurate were my predictions?

The Alexa skills economy is still in its infancy. On a lark, Joel Wilson started developing skills for Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, this past January. After a few weeks of coding, he launched two skills -- Amazon's term for voice-controlled apps -- called Question of the Day and Three Questions. I was just doing it for fun," said Wilson, 47, CEO of a small marketing analytics company in Washington, DC. Joel Wilson has created skills such as Three Questions and Question of the Day. In May, he got an email from Amazon telling him to expect a check in the mail as part of a new program that pays cash to makers of popular skills. That first month, Amazon sent him $2,000. It got better from there. He's received checks for $9,000 over each of the past three months, he said. Wilson unexpectedly joined a new Alexa economy, a small but fast-growing network of independent developers, marketing companies and Alexa tools makers. They're working to bring you voice-activated flash briefings, games and recipes through Amazon's Echo speaker, Alexa's primary home. By doing so, they hope to define the 3-year-old Alexa platform and make money from voice computing's surging popularity. Two years ago, there wasn't nearly as much to do on Alexa and the market for making Alexa skills was worth a mere $500,000. Now, with more than 25,000 skills available, the market is expected to hit $50 million in 2018, according to analytics firm VoiceLabs. That's dwarfed by the mobile app economy, with global sales of over $50 billion, but Alexa is growing at a far faster rate. Customers rarely pay these developers and marketers directly, but they have a big stake in these workers' efforts. Their success, or failure, will determine the number and the quality of skills, such as more complex games, better smart-home controls and more services from companies like Lyft or Domino's Pizza. Alexa is an increasingly important business for Amazon, which is expanding the assistant into millions of internet-connected gadgets and moving it into the workplace. Drawing in more developers will help the company sell more Alexa-powered devices and strengthen its top-dog status in voice. It's sold more than 20 million Echo speakers in the US, taking up 70 percent of the market and helping Alexa become the most active voice market for developers today. "Every skill makes Alexa smarter or more useful," Rob Pulciani, director of Amazon Alexa, said in a statement to CNET. "We can't do that by ourselves and we want to enable indie developers to innovate and extend Alexa capabilities at a rapid pace.

Many industries are already looking for ways to apply AI. More Individuality through Big Data Artificial Intelligence is a key element of Big Data – also called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The rational behind is simple and complex at the same time: to find out as much as possible about a customer by using comprehensive data management to then use the insights in order to meet the customer's individual needs. Big Bata stands for individuality. The essential resource is data – huge amounts of data.

LOS ANGELES -- Looking back at 2017's tech products that bombed, none of these misses was more glaring than some wild video sunglasses that didn't exactly snap with consumers. The cute $129 video sunglasses called Spectacles from Snapchat parent Snap were initially hard to get. Then Snap put them on sale nationally in February and the broader based of national consumers showed little interest in the product, leaving a backlog of thousands of unsold glasses, and a $40 million write-down from Snap. A Wi-Fi enabled juicer with a sky-high price tag of $400 didn't make a lot of sense to consumers, especially when it required a subscription to buy proprietary Juicero bags of fruit to turn into juice. Another blow against this product was the discovery that squeezing the bags with your raw hands worked just as well as turning on the juicer.