This might be a helpful time to clarify that AI is often a catch-all term for an assortment of different technologies. There's artificial intelligence in our digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana and the Google Assistant. You'll find artificial intelligence in software like Facebook's Messenger chatbots and Gmail's auto-replies. It's defined as "intelligence displayed by machines" but also refers to situations when computers do things without human instructions. Then there's machine-learning, which is when computers teach themselves how to perform tasks that humans do.

We've all heard or read about how robots are going to take away our jobs. Saudi Arabia even went as far as granting citizenship to "Sophia the robot" back in October (See the video below). With crytocurrency at the top of daily headlines, 2017 may be remembered as the year artificial intelligence (AI, pronounced AYE-EYE) goes mainstream with more organizations adopting AI than ever. Two weeks ago, we wrote about Professor Geoffrey Hinton, known worldwide as the Godfather of AI, and how his research work in the area of Neuro Net was used in speech recognition and Android voice search. Yes, we've made a lot of progress since AI started as an academic discipline in 1956.

Occasional creepiness notwithstanding, kids seem to love Alexa. Jeremy Cornforth works at the State Department in Washington and is the father of 5-year-old twins. When he brought home an Echo, "We just told them it was a speaker, and it was a computer, and it could understand the things they said. They took to it immediately," he said. "There's a little power struggle now over who gets to control it."

After jumping head first into the hardware game last year with the Pixel phones and Home smart speaker, Google seriously picked up the pace in 2017. Not only were there two awesome new Pixel phones, but also smaller and larger Google Home devices, as well as a pair of Pixel-branded earbuds. And through it all, Google's AI-powered Assistant got smarter and smarter. Google took its share of lumps over the past 12 months, and proved that making great hardware isn't as easy as it looks. The Pixel 2 is a gret follow-up to Google's first handset.

This article is part of CMO.com's December series about 2018 trends, predictions, and new opportunities. We're all aware of the immense impact that technology has had on the ways in which consumers interact with brands. Think about some early inventions--such as the telephone in 1876 and the television in 1926--which gave businesses an easy way to connect with consumers on a more intimate level, from the comfort of their homes. Fast-forward to the late 1970s, when people could purchase personal computers, and next, 1991, when the Internet (World Wide Web) became available to the world. Both brought with them dramatic changes.

Lisa Lacy is a reporter who covers digital and search marketing. Despite millions of orders for voice enabled devices, vendors have yet to map the uncharted territory of voice enabled search and advertising. Indeed, as voice search expands -- to the tune of 50 percent of all searches by 2020 (according to some estimates) -- so, too, do opportunities for platforms to cash in beyond products and services. In fact, in an earnings call last year, Google acknowledged voice search will drive industry-wide change, but it did not detail its plans. These devices are already in a massive (and growing) number of American homes.Amazon's Black Friday weekend sales saw millions of orders for voice-enabled devices that could help generate $10 billion in additional revenue by 2020, split evenly between device sales and shopping, according to investment bank RBC Capital.

"I have FOMO for the future", says Sam Lessin. That's why his startup Fin is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter.

It's unsurprising that connected-home technologies and virtual assistants should both be expected to mature after the learning technologies, given the former rely heavily on artificial intelligence, which in turn relies almost completely on the latter.

And it wasn't just the weekly political dramas, sexual harassment scandals or a massive security breach that affected nearly half the population that had us down. There was also a slew of terrible consumer devices that sullied our mood this year. Before we say goodbye to them, though, let's relive the horror one last time. Here's hoping that 2018 brings us better gadgets than this sorry lot. Even though Juicero technically debuted in 2016, it wasn't until 2017 that it met its epic end, and it's for that reason we're naming it one of the worst gadgets of the year.

Were you lucky enough to get a new iPhone for the holidays? Well, here are some things you should know about your new Apple phone. You've come to grips with the fact that Apple removed the standard headphone jack on recent iPhone models and bought the company's branded $159 wireless AirPods. Or maybe you received these Bluetooth headphones as a holiday present. Either way, you'll want to make the most out of these small earbuds, which I frequently use and like a lot.