Google's strategy to be part of a smarter connected home consists of its Google Home speaker and its Google WiFi router. Now it's being reported that the search engine giant is considering to combine the two into a single device. The problem with Google Home and Google WiFi is that users will need multiple of these devices to work all over their houses. Google Home is able to provide Google Assistant and music playback all over the house if users have multiple of these scattered around. Likewise, Google WiFi is able to provide consistent and strong internet connection throughout a house if users have a number of this device.

There is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence; sadly, not a lot of substance. We are in such early days of AI that I prefer to talk about what is happening in Machine Learning since that is the current stage of the AI future we are in. We are currently trying to teach computers to see, hear, learn, and more. Right now, that is the focus of every major effort that will someday be considered AI. When I think about how tech companies will progress in this area, I think about it from the standpoint of what data they have access to.

With the explosion of technology in the digital space, customer expectations and website capabilities are constantly changing. As we approach the middle part of 2017, now is a good time to closely examine trends that will have the greatest impact on the industry this year. There are now more than a billion websites available, and the amount of data online has exploded from 130 exabytes in 2005 to an anticipated 40,000 in 2020. In response to the incredible amount of information available online, brands now compete with each other to provide customers relevant content. This has driven industry advancements and led to greater customer expectations from brands and their associated websites.

When using Siri, users can give commands the digital assistant to do many tasks. However, the mechanism by which Google Assistant's rival responds to voice commands is proven to be flawed. For one thing, Siri is designed to respond to commands given by anyone, so people aside from the owner of the device can ask the AI assistant to do stuff, including accessing personal data. Fortunately, Apple appears to be working on a solution already. A new patent application by the Cupertino giant contains details on how Samsung's biggest rival is planning to make Siri more secure.

Google Home has just launched in the UK, and it's immediately offered a glimpse into an extremely bright future. It's a direct rival to the much-lauded Amazon Echo, and is designed to provide users with help around the house. Inside the box, you'll find a power cable, instructions and the Google Home device itself. For such an alien-looking thing, it's actually really easy to set up. All you need to do is plug it into your mains and hook it up to your home Wi-Fi network and Google account via the free Google Home app on your phone.

AI assistants aren't going away any time soon, but their implementation is constantly shifting and evolving. Alexa is invading every gadget in our homes, Siri might soon do the same, and Google Assistant will probably be uploaded to our brains before too long. Now there's another one to consider, called Duo -- no, not Google's video chat app, a totally different Duo. It's an AI-powered, 27 inch smart mirror with multitouch, built-in apps with its own app store, connectivity to smart devices, facial recognition, multi-user support, and natural language recognition. You can buy one right now, though you won't actually get it until the estimated shipping date of October.

There is no way to spell "retail" without AI. The power of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the consumer journey dominated the conversation at Shoptalk this week. In its second year, Shoptalk brought together 5,000-plus players across the full ecosystem to better understand the continuous evolution of how consumers discover, browse and buy in the digital era. AI, which refers to technologies capable of performing tasks normally requiring human intelligence, goes back centuries. The idea of cognitive computing gained steam in the 1940s when Alan Turing suggested that a machine could simulate any conceivable act of mathematical deduction.

A recent comic strip called GIL depicted an 8-year-old boy calling out commands to what he thought was the Amazon Echo. After two simple directives and no response, he shouted, "Alexa! What is wrong with you?!" Gil's mother saw this and asked her son why he was yelling at her new coffee grinder. The fact that there's a front-page comic strip in the Sunday newspaper dedicated to an artificial intelligence system tells me the technology is officially mainstream. Analysts predict voice will be the next big user interface, and though I'm skeptical of predictions for reasons we laid out in our February issue of Business Information, this is one forecast I believe.

But for a growing number of people, it's a mystery based not in the vagaries of human emotion but rather in the ones and zeros of proprietary software. According to an April 5 industry trend report focusing on voice-activated systems like Google Home and Amazon Echo, users are getting more than unsolicited Beauty and the Beast ads out of their digital assistants. That's right, people these days are intimately connecting to the Alexas of the world -- or at least fantasizing about doing so, anyway. "Over a third (37%) of regular voice technology users say that they love their voice assistant so much that they wish it were a real person," reads the report. "Even more astonishing is that more than a quarter of regular voice technology users say they have had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant."

Robo advisors are steadily growing in popularity, and these online investment advisors are threatening to take massive amounts of business away from traditional financial advisors. Automated financial advisor apps and services will manage approximately 10% of all global assets under management (AUM) by 2020, according to projections from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. But how do robo advisors work? Is automated portfolio management truly better than a human being who manages your funds? Read on to learn the basics of robo advisors and what the future holds for this segment of the finance world.