If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. With Amazon Prime Day coming up, there will be lots of deals Prime members can only get by ordering through an Amazon Alexa device. If you don't already have an Echo or Fire device, now is the perfect chance to get one for a great low price. The Amazon Tap, Amazon's portable bluetooth speaker, gives you a great way to listen to your music anywhere you are.

These were all prime fields of growth and innovation in 2016 and we can expect these trends to continue into next year and probably far beyond. In truth 2017 is likely to be the year when many of these technologies hit the mainstream – rather than something only those companies with the largest corporate budgets and most tech-friendly executive teams. A strong growth in the availability of technology delivered "as-a-service" through cloud platforms, as well as hardware improvements in the form of affordable sensor and display technologies, should help to bring into reality the "democratization" of data-driven enterprise which has become fashionable to talk about this year. So here is a run-through of my key predictions for the next year. Organizations wanting to stay ahead of the curve will want to ensure they are exploring all of the opportunities indicated by these trends.

Its still hard to say if the voice-controlled aluminum can will be the next smartphone or the next Segway, but either way, brands are preparing. This morning Adobe launched a new fixed of analytics tools, Adobe Sensei for Voice, to help brands are benefiting from conversational data to improve targeting and, ideally, conversions. Adobe tells it can eat data from Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana and Bixby( lol one day). The corporation captures both user intent and contextual data context that can be put to use by brands when targeting clients across other channels like social and email. This entails Adobe can track the actions users most often take with their conversational AI of choice and the things they regularly interact with imagine calling an Uber versus listening to the latest Portugal.

NEW YORK--Things are starting out miserably for Bixby. Samsung's upstart artificial intelligence digital assistant got an "incomplete" grade when it first turned up on the Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones that launched in March. The reason is that the voice-based commands that promise to make Bixby behave more like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant were delayed, at least in the U.S. (Bixby Voice is fully operational in South Korea, where Samsung is based.) Now the Korea Herald is reporting further delays to the English-speaking version of Bixby, apparently because Samsung can't amass the "big data" required for a good enough deep learning-based experience. Samsung's Bixby finally gets a voice -- sort of While Samsung recently granted early access to select S8 and S8 users who expressed interest in trying out Bixby Voice, me among them, I'm being kind to suggest that Bixby has a lot of catching up to do compared to its rivals.

Nir's Note: This guest post is by Darren Austin, Partner Director of Product Management at Microsoft. Last year we added a new member to our household. I must admit that upon first meeting her, our initial impression was that she was a little creepy. Today though, we can't imagine life without her. We've never seen her face, but we talk to her throughout the day, every day. She helps us keep track of our to-dos and shopping list, reads us the news and weather, and can sing nearly any song we'd like to hear.

Over the next 12 months, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) look set to make a huge explosion into the mainstream. We've already seen the launch of various smart virtual assistants, such as Alexa, Amazon's Echo and Google Home, with four million people already having adopted a device in the UK. And Apple is due to join the voice-activated assistant space with its HomePod device that will be released towards the end of this year. Recently, there has been a lot of conversation around how these developing technologies could change the way we shop. With the rise of mobile shopping, the way we make purchases has been quickly evolving.

Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant that powers, among other things, its popular Echo smart speaker, has grown its third-party-created skillset from 10,000 to 15,000 in under six months, as developers race to get their software on what has become an increasingly popular platform. The figures come from Voicebot, which analysed skills available in the US, and shows a massive acceleration in the volume of third-party software available through Alexa. At the start of the year, there were around 7,000 skills available on the platform, according to Voicebot, and Amazon's official figures suggest that in September 2016, there were only around 3,500. 'Flash Briefings', which provide audio updates on news, weather and other topics, are the most popular skills, making up 20 per cent of the US skills store. With both a clear use case and a simple development process, publishers have flocked to this format, with The Wall Street Journal, NPR and The Washington Post all launching Alexa Skills that saw significant downloads.

How do eCommerce enterprises earn loyalty from their users? And, notably, one of the most popular means to delight eCommerce users is personalization. However, for eCommerce enterprises, personalization has been largely limited to their websites. Moreover, website personalization itself is mostly segment-based and not implemented at a 1:1 scale. To achieve remarkable customer loyalty and engagement rates, it is imperative for eCommerce brands to provide a highly personalized experience to users across all touchpoints.

The Alibaba (BABA) versus Amazon (AMZN) contest is getting more interesting. Alibaba is now convinced that Bezos' Alexa-enabled Echo smart speaker is really an effective way to compel more people to do repeat online purchases. It understood why Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), and Samsung (OTC:SSNLF) all came up with copycat versions of the Amazon Echo. Jack Ma also probably believed RBC Capital Markets' projection that the Echo speaker could generate $10 billion in business for Amazon by 2020. Even though Alibaba is a Business-to-Business [B2B] e-commerce operator, it is now selling its own $73 smart speaker. I do not know the exact details regarding how Alibaba will implement the cloud Artificial Intelligence component in the Tmall Genie.

We're often puzzled as to how people can use terminology to put an entirely new coat of paint on something that's been around for a long time and then purport that it's new and exciting. Take robo advisors as an example. In the good old days, you met with a wealth manager who asked you a bunch of questions and then plugged them into a piece of software that said where you should optimally invest your money. Usually, this is just a very simple asset allocation strategy with X% in bonds and Y% in stocks based on your age and appetite for risk. Then, as a result of the perpetual cost savings initiatives that permeate the corporate world, we decided to remove the human element, externalize the software, and call it a "robo advisor", a term that somehow implies that there is more under the hood than there actually is.