Familiarize yourself with the AI technologies available today and prepare for adoption -- or face the inevitability of disruption. These days it seems like you can't open a newspaper (OK, web browser) without coming across an article on artificial intelligence (AI). Machine learning, task automation and robotics are already widely used in business. These and other AI technologies are about to multiply, and we look at how organizations can best take advantage of them. Publicized breakthroughs -- like Google AlphaGo's unprecedented victories over human Go champions -- have heralded the promise of a new golden age for AI.

People walking around with tablet computers, talking to the thin air and waiting for information...this was my kitchen on Monday night. But twenty years ago, the only place you could find such wonders was as part of the future envisioned by the creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation. With the activation word "Computer," Picard (the greatest starship captain ever) and his crew could access and command their ship's LCARS system. Now, if you own an Amazon Echo device, you can bring that bit of the future back to your kitchen. Hot." Doesn't get you an instant cup of tea. Find your device in the list and select it. Scroll down a bit until you find the Wake Word setting. Select Computer from the menu, click Done, and you're good to go. It might take a couple of minutes for the change to propagate down to your Echo. Now, the next time you want to find out what the weather is, order a fresh supply of paper towels, or listen to an audio book, you can bark "Computer!" in your best fake accent and have your Echo respond. It's a little Easter Egg for those sci-fi nerds among us; but it's one that's greatly appreciated. Just don't expect anything to appear when you say "Computer.

Does this mean we're one step close to transporters and phasers? File photo shows an Amazon Echo, one of the hot tech products of 2016. Amazon updated the wake words for Alexa, its digital voice assistant made popular by the Echo home speaker. Instead of tapping the speaker to wake Alexa, owners can use specific words to get Alexa's attention, including Alexa, Echo and Amazon. Add one more to the list: Computer.

Every year, with the introduction of new social platforms and apps, brands face increased challenges of reaching their target customers. In addition to pivoting to keep up with changes to existing platforms, digital marketers have to create new strategies around emerging digital marketing trends. Luckily, along with new social media networks, technology advances enable the development of tools and software to improve digital marketing efforts. Industry leaders are seeing the opportunities and benefits of emerging trends for social media and content marketing. Here, we have identified what we think will be the 7 biggest trends to impact digital marketing for 2017.

Amazon is enabling lots of other manufacturers to build their own hardware that taps its cloud-based digital assistant, Alexa. That's a smart strategy if Amazon's objective is to make Alexa ubiquitous in the smart home and home entertainment markets. But the online retailer should also be careful not to allow too many subpar products like Jam Audio's Jam Voice to be associated with the Alexa brand. Even after Jam Audio slashed the Jam Voice's asking price from $79.99 to $59.99 in the wake of the $129 Google Home and Amazon's own $49.99 Echo Dot, the Jam Voice is merely a so-so product. And in a market where the competition is so good, being only so-so is a big no-no.

It seems pretty clear that 2017 is going to be the year that Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant really begins to hit its stride, going from a fast-growing niche product to a mainstream must-have. While Microsoft and especially Google have made their competitive strategies clear -- even Samsung and Baidu have started to make rumbles in the market -- there's one elephant that, notably, isn't in the room yet: Apple, the most valuable company in the world and a notorious latecomer to any new product category. While Apple recently built Siri into the Apple TV, the company is said to be working on a direct competitor to the Amazon Echo -- one that would apparently be more advanced than anything we've seen, down to a possible facial-recognition camera so it knows who's talking. That device, if and when it comes out, would bring Apple's 5-year-old Siri assistant head-to-head with Alexa. And the clock is ticking.

Voice-controlled assistants are having a moment. But there may be an intriguing wrinkle that their makers have to smooth out: users don't seem to be using many apps. The number of Skills--the Amazon name for apps that operate on its Alexa smart assistant software--available for the company's Echo smart speaker have risen significantly in the past six months, from 950 last May to over 8,000 today. But an analysis of the way people use Alexa and and Google's Assistant platforms shows that third-party apps aren't too well used, nor particularly sticky. The analysis, which was carried out voice software start-up Voice Labs, shows that most app don't get any user reviews, which suggests they're not very popular.

Today, with Digitization of everything, 80 percent the data being created is unstructured. Audio, Video, our social footprints, the data generated from conversations between customer service reps, tons of legal document's texts processed in financial sectors are examples of unstructured data stored in Big Data. Organizations are turning to natural language processing (NLP) technology to derive understanding from the myriad of these unstructured data available online and in call-logs. Natural language processing (NLP) is the ability of computers to understand human speech as it is spoken. NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that has many important implications on the ways that computers and humans interact.

You might have detected a "bit" of intentional tongue-in-cheek in my recent coverage of the most "intriguing" products released at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, but rest assured that the news wasn't all bizarre. Some truly significant technologies (and products based on them) were both introduced for the first time and notably advanced from prior versions. I thought I'd devote this particular post to showcasing three that particularly stuck with me. Learning goes deep While the world may not need an electric toothbrush that claims to have "artificial intelligence", both that term and the comparable "deep learning" were everywhere at CES, often for good reason. Traditionally, computer vision, audio analysis, and other similar applications have relied on special-purpose algorithms custom-designed to recognize particular patterns.

From creating personalized shopping experiences to offering virtual buying assistants -- AI is improving the online shopping experience for consumers and retailers. Shoppers will be able to easily find the best price for an item and communicate with chatbots for quick customer service. For retailers, they'll be able to better analyze consumer data to predict future buying patterns, create autonomous replenishing systems and also save money and time on customer service by utilizing chatbots. Related: Has Artificial Intelligence Arrived At The Sales Function Yet? A number of companies already employ AI in their ecommerce processes today.