It's time to prep for Apple's next big event and carefully consider what could happen if the government legalizes "hacking back." Tune in Monday.What to expect from Apple at WWDC 2017 This week Apple will put on a big show for developers but, as usual, we're also listening. That's because we could get news about everything from an Echo-fighting Siri speaker to refreshed MacBooks and iPads. On the software side, we're expecting to find out how Siri will keep up with its AI assistant competition, and what's next for both iOS and MacOS. E3 is still more than a week away, but EA has already dropped off one big game announcement: a name, release date and trailer for the next Need for Speed.

SAN JOSE With iPhone sales slowing and the last new Apple product released two years ago, expectations are building for what the company will reveal next week at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Some Apple watchers are counting on artificial intelligence. With Facebook, Microsoft and Google emphasizing AI in their conferences over the past two months, market analysts believe it is Apple's turn. As the race for artificial intelligence heats up in Silicon Valley, some worry that Apple is already behind the game. "If Apple skips AI, I would consider that a significant miss on their opportunity," said John Jackson, a Boston-based analyst for IDC.

Artificial intelligence is a term that used to seem so far away, reserved only for futuristic movies and books. The expression can spark controversy, with people concerned faceless machines and robots will soon replace them and their colleagues. But the reality is, AI is already so present in everyday life. There are virtual personal assistants, video games, smart cars, purchase prediction, fraud protection, online customer support, news generation, security surveillance, smart home devices, and so much more.

Many industry experts predict that our interactions with computing devices will move away from text-based input towards voice-based input in the future. Smartphones, voice-enabled speakers and other devices already come with so-called smart assistants such as Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant. These virtual assistants can help you organize your day, control smart home devices and answer general questions. According to research conducted by digital agency Stone Temple "smart assistants" may not be quite as smart as they are made out to be. Take Amazon's Alexa for example: the assistant powering the company's popular line of voice-enabled speakers was able to answer just 20.7 percent of the 5,000 questions fired at it as part of the experiment.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is advancing so rapidly that even its developers are being caught off guard. Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in Davos, Switzerland, in January that it "touches every single one of our main projects, ranging from search to photos to ads … everything we do … it definitely surprised me, even though I was sitting right there." The long-promised AI, the stuff we've seen in science fiction, is coming and we need to be prepared. Today, AI is powering voice assistants such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, allowing them to have increasingly natural conversations with us and manage our lights, order food, and schedule meetings. Businesses are infusing AI into their products to analyse the vast amounts of data and improve decision-making.

Who here remembers taking computer programming in school? Whether you learned programming by punching holes in a never ending series of cards, or by writing simple DOS or other computer language commands, the fact remained that computers needed an incredibly precise set of instructions to accomplish a task. The more complicated the task, the more complicated your instructions had to be. Machine learning is inherently different. Rather than telling a computer exactly how to solve a problem, the programmer instead tells it how to go about learning to solve the problem for itself.

The new Archive feature recently spotted in Google Photos is now rolling out to all users, but it has an extra trick. While the Archive button lets you push more mundane photos (scans of receipts, screenshots of a random tweet, or maybe particularly personal photograph) out of the main Photos display without deleting it, there's also a new suggestion in the Assistant tab that will use its machine learning skills to find likely candidates for you. Of course, you can manually archive photos any time you like (they'll still show up in search or inside albums), but if you already have a significant Photos catalog this should make things easier. Whether you're using Android, iOS or the website, the new option should be there. New! See suggestions for photos to archive, so you can move photos you don't want to see in your main library.

During SpeechTEK, which was held in late April in Washington, D.C., hundreds of customer care professionals gathered to wrestle with the shifting sand that is customer care, particularly the challenges and opportunities presented by automation in the form of virtual assistants or chatbots. The conference provided insights that included answers, objections, and more questions. Companies spend massively on customer care and automation will reduce costs. In Tuesday's keynote panel, Cognitive Code's Chief Operating Officer (COO) Brian Garr said industry observers estimate customer care spending to be nearly $500 billion. Everest Group estimated in 2016 that call center spending was $300 to $320 billion annually.

Globally, the native digital assistant installed base is set to exceed 7.5 billion active devices by 2021, which is more than the world population according to the US Census Bureau on May 1, 2017. But fear not – Skynet, from the popular Terminator movies, does not feature among the leading digital assistants. Instead, Google Assistant will dominate the voice AI–capable device market with 23.3% market share, followed by Samsung's Bixby (14.5%), Ovum's Digital Assistant and Voice AI–Capable Device Forecast: 2016–21 found that smartphones and tablets clearly lead the voice AI–capable device market, with 3.5 billion active devices in 2016, most of which use Google Now and Apple Siri. However, the use of AI in conjunction with other devices greatly increases consumer engagement and is set to unlock new opportunities, particularly in the home. Ovum expects an exponential uptake of voice AI capabilities among new devices, including wearable, smart home, and TV devices, with a combined installed base of 1.63 billion active devices in 2021, a tenfold increase on 2016.

There's no doubt that AI is a hot topic right now. Whether it's financial services or healthcare, most industries are looking to capitalize on the technology for their benefit. Looking at the hotel industry specifically, is it another example of technology looking for a problem to solve? To answer the question, we need to consider where AI is currently in use, the heady design considerations around the technology, and articulating what it could mean moving forward. In the first place, AI is not new to the travel and hospitality industry.