Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming the next transformational technology. Market intelligence firm Tractica forecasts that revenue generated by AI will soar from $1.4 billion in 2016 to $59.8 billion by 2025. What may surprise you even more is how pervasive the technology has become over the last several years. A number of recent advances in AI have already made their way into our daily lives. Here are six ways you may already be interacting with this groundbreaking technology -- without even realizing it.

In an odd turn for retail cooperation, Best Buy is now available on Alexa, Amazon's voice-powered digital assistant. Starting today, you can learn about and order Best Buy's Deal of the Day sales just by saying, "Alexa, talk to Best Buy." Sure, it seems odd to have a competing service on Amazon's own devices, but as the blog post from Best Buy points out, the big box store has been selling Amazon Alexa devices in a special section in about 700 of its stores earlier this year. Best Buy is only the latest retailer to jump on the voice-shopping trend, too. This isn't the first time Amazon has allowed a competitor into its garden, either. Spotify and Pandora live easily next to Amazon's own music service on its connected smart speakers, as do competing on-demand video services.

Digital technologies are creating value and rearranging roles in the travel industry. Here's how industry leaders are profiting from the change. Over the past 20 years, advances in digital technologies have driven numerous innovations and disruptions in the travel industry. These technologies and the companies that offer them have rearranged the industry, leaving some players behind--travel agents, for example--while introducing more complexity into the value chain between travelers and destinations. More recently, mobile technologies have taken center stage as consumer behavior shifts with astonishing speed toward researching and booking travel through smartphones.

One of the most important things I have learned while reporting on AI is that systems built on machine learning may be able to beat humans, or approximate their results, but they can often fail in ways that humans never would, and with unintended consequences. Consider the tale of a Redditor who asked earlier this week whether the Google Home had an internal temperature sensor. He was feeling a bit chilly at home and asked the assistant "What's the temperature inside?" He figured that the system would figure out the temperature from his Nest thermostat and report that back to him. Instead, the Google Assistant went and fetched the weather report for Side, a resort town in Turkey.

Gift-giving season shouldn't be confined to Christmas and birthdays, especially with tech as cool as this. Give your nose a reason to get out of bed with Sensorwake's olfactory alarm clock, which emits aromatic perfume such as Seaside, Peppermint and Toast to start your day on the right note. The HomePod is Apple's answer to the virtual home assistant trend, but the highlight here is the sound quality. Built-in spatial awareness helps the HomePod cater to the acoustics of the room. This one's for the friend who's always asking, "Have you seen my keys?"

Farfield speech recognition has become a popular research area in the past few years, from more research focused activities such as the CHiME Challenges, to the launches of Amazon Echo and Google Home. This talk will describe the research efforts around Google Home. Most multichannel ASR systems commonly separate speech enhancement, including localization, beamforming and postfiltering, from acoustic modeling. In this talk, we will introduce a framework to do multichannel enhancement jointly with acoustic modeling using deep neural networks. Inspired by beamforming, which leverages differences in the fine time structure of the signal at different microphones to filter energy arriving from different directions, we explore modeling the raw time-domain waveform directly.

"We are in an AI revolution," according to James Barratt, documentary filmmaker and author. "AI of course has gone through a number of false springs, but this one seems to have a lot more traction." TechRepublic's Dan Patterson met with Barratt to discuss where artificial intelligence (AI) is headed, and how businesses can take advantage. AI previously was used to enter data, and get back an answer, he said. Now, AI will learn about its users and what they are doing.

The deputy director of a large county human services agency, she's been wrestling all week with staff turnover and media coverage about long wait times for services. Heading home on Friday evening, she worries that she might spend the rest of her career playing defense at work. After a Saturday morning of chauffeuring her kids to soccer games and music lessons, Natalie collapses on the couch. She relaxes to music from one of her favorite radio stations, wondering how Pandora always manages to serve up exactly the songs that fit her mood. After she's had a chance to unwind, Siri gives her the week's top headlines, reminds her that her niece's graduation is coming up, recommends a gift for the niece, and, when Natalie confirms the choice, places an order. Later, Natalie's fitness band reminds her that it's time to head to the gym for a session with her trainer. On the way to the gym, Waze alerts her to an accident ahead and automatically routes her around it.

Cisco introduces Spark Assistant and Spark Room 70, and lays out its AI roadmap. Cisco this week is holding its annual reseller conference, Partner Summit, in Dallas. When Rowan Trollope, SVP & GM of IoT and Applications at Cisco, delivered his keynote today, the company unveiled its AI-powered voice assistant with the not so inventive name of "Cisco Spark Assistant." There is, of course, a veritable cornucopia of voice assistants out there, as we can ask Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana or other popular AIs a question and get a prompt answer back. The reasons that communications and collaboration industry professionals should care is because the Spark AI is entirely focused on improving meetings.

Pikachu is virtually inescapable in the tech world, and that includes the smart speaker in your living room. The Pokémon Company has previewed Pikachu Talk, an app meant for Alexa- and Google Assistant-powered devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. The name says it all, really: you can hold conversations with the iconic yellow critter. We wouldn't expect deep discussions when Pikachu can only respond with variants of its name ("pika pika!" isn't exactly My Dinner With Andre material), but it's bound to be fun for at least a little while if you're a Pokémon fan. You may be waiting a while to try this.