As expected, the opening keynote of Google's I/O 2017 developer conference was a doozy. For two and a half hours, CEO Sundar Pichai and a handful of execs rattled off a staggering list of futuristic features and products: A camera that understands what it sees! AI tools a high-schooler can use to help detect cancer! To watch the address was to feel like the future had just arrived, all at once, right before your eyes. Then you go down the list of actual new things, the stuff you can try right now.

Artificial Intelligence Set to Transform Insurance Industry but Integration Challenges Remain, According to Accenture Report Insurers are investing in AI technology to enhance the customer experience, empower their own people NEW YORK; Apr. 19, 2017 – Insurance executives believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will significantly transform their industry in the next three years, with insurers investing in AI to empower agents, brokers and employees to enhance the customer experience with automated personalized services, faster claims handling and individual risk-based underwriting processes, according to Accenture's Technology Vision for Insurance 2017. At the same time, however, the report found that insurers face challenges integrating AI into their existing technology, citing issues such as data quality, privacy and infrastructure compatibility. Titled "Technology for People," the report is based on the insights of a technology advisory board, interviews with industry technologists and a survey of more than 550 insurance executives across 31 countries. According to the report, three-quarters (75 percent) of insurance executives believe that AI will either significantly alter or completely transform the overall insurance industry in the next three years. One-third (32 percent) believe that their own company will be "completely transformed" by AI within that timeframe, and an additional 39 percent believe that AI will "significantly change" their company.

At first, there was a text box. You typed in your query, and in return, you'd get millions of search results, ordered by their relevance and popularity, among several other factors. When the mobile revolution came, thanks in no small way to Android democratising the principles behind the iPhone, the way people interacted with technology changed. But the way information was understood, processed, and sorted on the Internet remained largely text-bound. "All of Google was built because we started understanding text and webpages," CEO Sundar Pichai said during his keynote address, at the developer-focused conference, Google I/O 2017. "The fact that computers can understand images and video has profound implications for our core mission."

Artificial intelligence (AI) was once a topic reserved for high-level computer scientists and futurists. Today, it doesn't come with such daunting baggage. Developments in the field have made AI accessible to just about everyone. AI subfields such as machine learning and natural language processing have even become buzzwords that we now constantly hear and read about in the news. And according to estimates, by 2020, the AI market will approach $50 billion.

There wasn't any one big product announcement at Google I/O keynote on Wednesday,the annual event when thousands of programmers meet to learn about Google's software platforms. Instead, it was a steady trickle of incremental improvements across Google's product portfolio. And almost all of the improvements were driven by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence --the software's growing ability to understand complex nuances of the world around it. Companies have been hyping artificial intelligence for so long -- and often delivering such mediocre results -- that it's easy to tune it out. AI is also easy to underestimate because it's often used to add value to existing products rather than creating new ones.

It turns out the smart mirror in the smart home is actually a smart camera, what a surprise! With talks of Snap Inc. becoming a "camera company" and Facebook resounding in its ability to replicate the trends as usual, it's a bit ironic that Alexa now is not just a "smart speaker", but can literally live inside your camera. That's the beauty of the evolution of computer vision and machine learning. Since Amazon's native image recognition technology, "Reokognition", can do facial analysis, it's a shoe-in that sentiment analytics can be easily integrated into how Amazon can potentially live in your closet.

Whether we want AI or not, it is going to be an important feature in our lives. While the first iterations did not attract many, with systems getting more intelligent, AI is certainly bound to attract more users. So, it was not a surprise when Google announced an AI-first strategy at its I/O conference this year. Basically, what this means is that Google will try to integrate as many services with its Assistant as it can over the coming years. Say, if one wants to book a cab-ride or a flight ticket, she would be able to do so using Google's services as the company integrates more apps across the platform.

On Thursday 4 May 2017, Hogan Lovells' Tech Hub hosted Azeem Azhar, renowned strategist, product entrepreneur and writer, who spoke about the current status and implications of Artificial Intelligence ("AI"). Far from being a futuristic ambition, we are living in a world where countless daily activities are powered by AI. Whilst Artificial General Intelligence may yet be a few years away, we are seeing applications of Artificial Narrow Intelligence across a range of use cases from virtual personal assistants to news generation, personalised content and movie recommendations. As Azeem outlined, this penetration of AI over the past few years has been growing exponentially. This has been enabled by the combination of progress in three critical areas, each of which supports and feeds into the other – processing power, availability of data and innovations in machine learning. Our ability to exploit these technological developments as consumers and businesses has been dramatically enhanced by the availability and accessibility of a range of devices on different platforms (iOS, Android, enterprise IT, etc.) which have themselves been further enabled by the advanced integration of software with real world.

You made it to the end of a long week. Here's your prize: an extended edition of our podcast from Thursday, where we discussed Google I/O's announcements. The I/O developers conference offered new details about Google's plans for Android, Google Assistant and Google Lens -- so much that we had a bit of trouble squeezing it all into three minutes and 59 seconds. Luckily, on the extended edition, there's more chatter about Google Photos, Google Assistant on iPhones (sorry Siri!), and augmented reality. So, kick back and enjoy our extended podcast this weekend.

Columnist Marc Saltzman shows all the new hands-free options for while you drive. If your vehicle doesn't have built-in Bluetooth, aftermarket speakerphones like the Parrot Minikit are simple to install and use. Perhaps there's one silver lining to battling the daily commute: you can stay productive and connected while behind the wheel – safely – thanks to today's hands-free technology. After all, holding a phone up to your ear can be a major distraction to those driving, while texting on a phone is even worse. Not only could you face a serious fine for distracted driving, but you might hurt yourself or others, or cause damage to your vehicle.