Google wants to bring smarts to cool gadgets and devices made using Raspberry Pi 3 or Intel's Edison. The company is chasing makers with open-source tools needed to add artificial intelligence to consumer, industrial, and retail devices made using board computers. The plan may include machine-learning tools, which are central to AI. AI helps Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana answer questions, and also helps self-driving cars cruise the streets safely. "We don't have any specifics to announce right now, but we're excited to keep sharing open-source machine learning tools with the community--stay tuned for more this year," a Google spokesman said in an email. Earlier this week, Google published a market research survey in an effort to get a better grip on the maker community and its priorities. In the survey, Google hinted it was bringing "smart tools" to makers.

Imagine if your name was synonymous with an incredibly popular form of artificial intelligence. For women with the name Alexa, the success of Amazon's digital assistant has made the name both more recognizable as well as spurred inevitable jokes about, for example, what the weather is doing (Amazon's Alexa can give a weather report). In December of last year, the tech giant said it had sold millions of Alexa-enabled units-- nine times more than the previous holiday season. The Echo is "officially mainstream," according to Slice Intelligence. I spoke to five Alexas for a lighthearted look at how they feel about their name.

At CES 2017, Microsoft announced that it is building a platform to enable automobile manufacturers to deliver connected car experiences to customers. Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform is a set of services that is integrated with Azure, Cortana, Office 365, Power BI, and Skype. In the last couple of years, Microsoft has doubled down its investment in machine learning (ML) and analytics. The company is embedding ML in almost all its products. Powered by Azure, these new set of services such as Azure ML, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Cortana Intelligence Suite takes advantage of the abundant compute and storage resources exposed by the underlying infrastructure.

Rapid, radical advances in artificial intelligence and deep learning in business are changing the stakes--and ushering in a new era of business and technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) has always seemed a bit futuristic. The ability of machines to tap massive amounts of data and use algorithms to "think" and'adapt" on the fly has been an alluring, if t somewhat elusive, concept. However, over the past few years, advances in digital technology have begun to redefine the AI landscape and usher in real-world capabilities. "We are seeing the technology take off in a big way," says Satya Ramaswamy, vice president and global head of digital enterprise for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

We are entering the age of the CUI, the conversational user interface. Already, there are 8.2 million voice-first devices in homes, mostly Amazon Echos. By the end of this year, that number will balloon to 33 million. That's the prediction from VoiceLabs, a startup that helps companies monitor and measure people's interaction with their Alexa Skills or Google Actions. Skills and actions are integration points between Alexa or Google Assistant and your technology; they are the conversational user interface equivalent of apps on Android or iOS smartphones.

The market of voice-controlled assistants is on fire at the moment. Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Assistant, just to name a few, are the most well-known digital assistants that are currenlty dominating the market. Their cornerstone lies in an aim to provide a seamless and hands-free experience, which empowers us and eases our daily lives. From playing music to ordering pizza, voice assistants seem to be taking the market by storm. In 2015 1.7 million voice-first devices have been shipped, and 6.5 million in 2016, that excluding the mobile-built in voice services. VoiceLabs, a voice software start-up, foresees that by the end of 2017 more than 24 million devices will find their new families and homes, totalling at 33 million voice-first gadgets in circulation.

Business intelligence (BI) tools first appeared on the enterprise technology scene several decades ago, at birth clumsy and difficult to use but ultimately improving the flow of data through organizations from their operational systems to decision support. Data warehousing cut the time it took to access data, but even at their full maturity, BI systems could do little more than produce data and reports in a traditional organized way. But with the advancement of artificial intelligence and--more importantly--machine learning, true business intelligence is actually on its way to the enterprise. Such self-learning software will run on servers, be built into bots, drive decision-making systems, be embedded into cars or aircraft, and become the beating heart of mobile devices. Increased data-processing power, the availability of big data, the Internet of Things, and improvements in algorithms are converging to power this actual business intelligence.

It's a brand new year, and by most reliable indicators – the latest demos at CES 2017, the buzz on all the tech blogs and even the pre-roll ads interrupting my binge watching of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – it looks like 2017 will be the year that voice interaction reaches mainstream adoption. Voice interaction – the ability to speak to your devices, and have them understand and act upon whatever you're asking them – was everywhere this year. Device manufacturers of all shapes and sizes heavily integrated voice capabilities into their offerings at CES 2017, with Amazon's Alexa stealing the show as their AI platform of choice. The rapid proliferation of voice interaction capabilities in our individual digital ecosystems raises critical questions for any designer whose work plays a role in the customer experience. It's becoming clear that voice interaction will soon become an expected offering as either an alternative, or even a full replacement to, traditional visual interfaces.

MyPolly is the world's first product that introduces continuous conversation via natural language understanding. MyPolly, which is currently in closed beta testing for developers and bot builders, enables virtual assistants and bots to interpret a human's input, making MyPolly "smarter" over time. Jack Crawford, Founder and CEO of datalog.ai and Malaikannan Sankarasubbu, Founder and CTO, started the company last year to equip bots and virtual assistants to intelligently remember associations between words and things. For example, you might say to your virtual assistant, "My dog's name is Sebastian." Later in the dialogue, MyPolly would recall your dog's name.

The little talking speaker that could, Amazon's Echo, is moving into the breakout phase of its success, according to data collected by analysts firm Slice Intelligence. The Echo is coming off a tremendously successful holiday shopping season, which saw not only a high volume of sales, but a key evolution in consumer demographics that's driving sales from a broader cross-section of buyers. Slice found that 50 percent of revenue related to Echo came from women, a trend which is a big change from the patterns at device launch, when overwhelming men tend to be the ones buying Echo. Slice identified this tendency originally around the launch of the first Echo, and now again during this most recent holiday season around the release of the new Echo Dot. That's not the only sign that Echo is going mainstream, however.