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On October 4th, roughly one year after the introduction of its branded line of hardware products, Google unveiled a second iteration of "Made by Google" hardware. This was a major product launch, but more than that, the presenters repeatedly hammered home Google's AI first messaging mantra with proof points in the form of a second generation branded product line built around AI and machine learning. The company's hardware strategy is clear. Google believes it is uniquely positioned to blend AI Software Hardware to deliver innovative products that will win in the marketplace, even if they are late to market. This second generation of Google hardware provides abundant proof that the company can bring uniquely differentiated features to existing product categories, and maybe even create some new ones.

Amazon's Alexa may boast tens of thousands of skills, but there's probably a handful you keep coming back to. If you're the adventurous type, you might use it to find baby-making tunes, brush up on Eurovision trivia, or play a tickling game. Everyone else, it seems, sticks to its most popular trick: creating lists. And, now Amazon is giving you the power to tally absolutely anything. The company is expanding Alexa's shopping and to-do list functions to include custom lists.

Digital banking brought a transformational wave to the banking system. As traditional banking practices slowly adjusted to the wave, artificial intelligence quickly caught up and made the bot market hotter than ever before. VentureBeat's 2016 Bots Landscape showed that under 200 companies, which make products ranging from personal assistants to AI tools and messaging, had $22 billion in funding and came with a whopping valuation of $159 billion. But there is a reason for these massive numbers. Do you have an AI strategy -- or hoping to get one?

Artificial intelligence is not a new concept. Sci-fi fans have been well acquainted with its principles since Isaac Asimov started getting books published, and more recently a generation that has grown up on video games has spent countless hours trying to outsmart AI entities. But in recent years AI has really come to the forefront of consumer electronics with the emergence of voice-controlled virtual assistants like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. These have quickly become prominent user interfaces across a range of devices, and are only becoming more important as consumers seem increasingly intent on leaving typing behind. Now, the field of AI represents an escalating arms race between a number of high-profile tech companies, with some smaller firms getting in on the action, too.

How do you see the world adapting/evolving in an AI environment? In terms of computer applications, we will see increasing application and adoption of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. We already see this in shopping recommendations, games, and large social networks. Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant use ML to perform natural language processing and classification to respond appropriately. Such techniques will make interacting with devices increasingly seamless, which will ultimately make technology easier to use while making humans more efficient in finding and managing information.

Voice assistants seem to represent the best of what films offered us in the future: the ability to control your home, your music and everything else about your life simply by talking to a digital butler. But science fiction never had them sounding quite so bad. Despite all the hype around voice assistants, they have mostly been confined to things that make them sound terrible when they speak. Siri mostly comes out of your phone speakers, for instance, and the best the Google Assistant can do is the little rounded Google Home. The Sonos One represents the first time that you can talk to a voice assistant and actually have its voice – and anything else it does – sound good.

That's what I thought when I got all my Sonos speakers playing the late Tom Petty's Won't Back Down and the first floor of my home filled with his distinct, Gainesville, Florida, twang. I chose that song with my voice and not by speaking to the first-generation Amazon Echo I have in my home, but by speaking directly to the brand new Sonos One smart speaker. Sonos is just one of an increasing number of third-party partners integrating Amazon's soon-to-be ubiquitous digital voice assistant Alexa. On the one hand, this seems redundant. Why do I need a Sonos Alexa-enabled speaker when I already have the Amazon Echo to drive what was my two-speaker Sonos system?

Sonos has multi-room audio down to a science, but it desperately needed a speaker capable of voice recognition if it was to fend off the veritable flood of smart speakers coming to market. The Sonos One is that speaker. It sounds better than the last entry-level Sonos speaker, it's compatible with Amazon's Alexa digital assistant, and it will be compatible with Google Assistant soon. If you already have Sonos speakers in other rooms, you can control all of them with voice commands with the addition of a single Sonos One to your network. And once you have that, you can control any Sonos speaker from any Amazon Echo.

In my house, we use it to play radio stations, to get the weather, and to answer questions like "When was the Edo period?" One thing I don't often use the Echo for is music. That's because it sounds terrible. As good as Amazon's Alexa voice service is, the Echo's black tin can croaks out audio just a notch better than the 20-year-old Coby FM radio I keep in the garage. Amazon has taken steps to improve the Echo's sound quality with a reboot last month, and companies like Lenovo have coaxed Alexa into nicer-sounding enclosures.