You'd think that, with Christmas mere days away, we'd be enjoying the holiday season with mulled wine and family time galore. Instead, its likely most of us are scrambling to finish shopping, wrapping and cooking whatever roast beast our family wants, all while attempting to complete those work projects that just keep popping up. While joyous and wonderful, the holidays can also be anything but namaste. Luckily, you can look no further than your trust friend Alexa to provide some much-needed "me time." This year, digital and creative agency Deutsch NY partnered with their artificial intelligence division, Great Machine, to create a wintry guided meditation that is perfect for the season.

Amazon's Echo has long ruled the smart home market, but Google Home's recent updates make it a contender for the top slot. The smart home market is evolving faster than you can say "third-party device," and the competition between these heavyweight companies is good for your wallet. Understanding the pros and cons of each platform is essential, especially when integrating home security devices. When it comes to digital assistants, Google Home and Amazon Echo are the clear front-runners in the smart home market. Their platforms utilize voice controls and massive libraries of available skills, and both offer integration with a number of third-party devices.

What if we don't need a smartphone as much as we think? That's a question I've been asking a lot over the past few months. In my office, I use Amazon Alexa to order products by voice, control the heat and lights, and to ask about weather forecasts. I used to always pick up my phone or use a computer for these tasks. While we might not totally leave the phones behind in 2018, there's a good chance we'll use them less and less. At home, I use the Google Home speaker, doing roughly the same thing to make voice commands and avoid picking up a phone or a tablet.

Certainly, it's undeniable that technology is becoming more and more commonplace in our present and it promises a huge leap in the days to come. Although there are some technologies which fizzle and dies away silently, there are some so significant that transmute the world we live in. Though the impact of artificial intelligence in our lives and work in the coming days is debated by experts, it can be gauged that Ai is making significant strides in several applications. According to a new research report by MarketsandMarkets, the market size is expected to grow from USD 2.61 Billion in 2017 to USD 9.88 Billion in 2022, at a CAGR of 30.5 percent. The increasing demand for AI-based solutions and proliferation in data generation are some of the major driving factors of the AI Platform Market.

Year after year, blockbuster films are replete with Turing-test-passing examples of AI -- and this past year was no exception. From Blade Runner 2049 to Marjorie Prime to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it seems the public's appetite for depictions of truly intelligent AI is insatiable. This tendency to dream of overly optimistic futures when it comes to technology is hardly relegated to the movies. In 2016, publications including Wired, Forbes, and, yes, VentureBeat, eagerly predicted a year where "machines will win" and AI will spark "the beginning of a new internet." However, while there have been massive advances in AI this year, particularly in semantic recognition, the future the media predicted is far from realized.

Dr Siddhartha Chatterjee, Chief Technology Officer at Persistent Systems, believes that machine learning will be the dominant technology trend in the coming year, even as he is cautious about the future of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoins. Of the 2017 technology trends that you predicted at the beginning of the year, which one in your opinion, was the most widely adopted? All of the trends that we predicted have generally been adopted widely over the course of the year. Based on our experience with clients and projects in 2017, I would say that machine intelligence (Machine Learning and Deep Learning) has been adopted into mainstream projects at a more accelerated pace than initially anticipated. On the consumer front, we saw widespread adoption of voice-enabled smart devices like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Pod etc.

In the not so distant future, we will have machines capable not only of storing data, but of thinking, feeling, and being as intelligent as the human being. Following the new trends in the information technology market, such as tracking digital transformation, is a key factor for organizations seeking to remain competitive with the great competition in the market. With increasingly advanced and sophisticated resources, technological innovations have computer machines that promise to facilitate the routine of companies, where intelligent machines can perform their activities in an optimized way. We are talking about the trend of the future, a revolutionary technology – Artificial Intelligence (AI). Artificial Intelligence is already part of our everyday life, but many times we do not even notice it.

Emergence of work Robo advisors If you're not Rumpelstiltskin, you've no doubt noticed the prolific rise of the talking speaker. There seems little to technically hold this back and from a cost optimization and process automation perspective, it makes all the sense in the world. Augmented Reality meets GoToMeeting A little play off #1, but if you mash what's going on with AR with the prohibitive cost of dedicated telepresence rooms, you get a budget busting way to see a screen with you and your colleagues sitting at the same table and interacting. You'll probably also be able to attend meetings in virtual person through a physically present android of some semblance (R2D2 style or perhaps like that annoying holographic person in the airports). Self-driving electric car innovations convergence hit a feverish pitch Chunky four German auto armies (Audi, Mercedes, Porsche, and BMW) release competing vehicles resulting in Telsa stock being challenged over their stretched diversification strategy and the need to refocus on the immediate autonomous competitive onslaught.

Big Data started with algorithms helpfully scouring vast amounts of data to find patterns. These days it feels a bit like Big Brother. Using machine learning and AI to tweak algorithms, companies are now able to deliver profound insights from datasets once considered impossible to compile. This collection and analysis has expanded so rapidly, it's pushing data holders off any existing ethical framework or map. Facing very little scrutiny, companies have been left on their own to establish right and wrong in this space.

Magic Leap today revealed a mixed reality headset that it believes reinvents the way people will interact with computers and reality. Unlike the opaque diver's masks of virtual reality – which replace the real world with a virtual one – Magic Leap's device, called Lightwear, resembles goggles, which you can see through as if you're wearing a special pair of glasses. The goggles are tethered to a powerful pocket-sized computer, called the Lightpack, and can inject life-like moving and reactive people, robots, spaceships – anything – into a person's view of the real world. "There's something about hanging out with comics and being able to experience them at your own pace that is very hypnotic," Ben Wolstenholme says Magic Leap, founded in 2011, remains a bit of a mystery, confounding tech writers and analysts with its ability to pull in seemingly endless amounts of investment from major companies and interest from bright minds. While the secretive augmented-reality startup has released a few high-level concept videos that show what it hopes to achieve by injecting virtual creations into the real world, it hasn't shown off a single piece of working technology to the public. It's been so long that some publications have even publicly wondered if the entire thing is a sort of scheme. That, despite the company's ever-increasing valuation – last listed at $6 billion. The whole company rides on the back of founder Rony Abovitz, a bombastic bioengineer who helped design the surgery-assisting robot arms of Mako Surgical Corp. The sale of that company for $1.65 billion funded nearly the first four years of Magic Leap. The last time the company spoke publicly in any great detail was about a year ago, when it invited Wired magazine to its South Florida headquarters to see the tech in action, but not to write about what the hardware looked like. Earlier this month, Glixel received a similar invitation. Abovitz invited me down to visit the company headquarters in Fort Lauderdale to write about the science of the technology and to finally detail how the first consumer headgear works and what it looks and feels like. This revelation – the first real look at what the secretive, multi-billion dollar company has been working on all these years – is the first step toward the 2018 release of the company's first consumer product. It also adds some insight into why major companies like Google and Alibaba have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Magic Leap, and why some researchers believe the creation could be as significant as the birth of the Internet. Technology like this "is moving us toward a new medium of human-computing interaction," said David Nelson, creative director of the MxR Lab at USC Institute for Creative Technologies.