Amazon announced that its virtual assistant Alexa will soon be able to deliver notifications, including telling you to go for a run if the weather is nice. Users will be able to enable notifications for specific updates about news, the weather and shopping. Skills like AccuWeather will provide weather updates, The Washington Post will provide breaking news alerts, and Just Eat will give food order confirmations. Amazon Echo is a voice-controlled smart speaker that works alongside a smartphone app. Using a virtual assistant called Alexa, the speaker can respond to voice commands from the user, such as setting an alarm or ordering a cab.

Google Assistant delivers the weather on a Google Pixel. Owners of the iPhone will have one more option for their digital voice assistant. Google's Assistant app is now available on the iPhone, giving Apple's Siri a run for her money. Whether at home or on the go, your Assistant is here to help. Google Assistant is the equivalent to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa.

Google's computer programs are gaining a better understanding of the world, and now it wants them to handle more of the decision-making for the billions of people who use its services. CEO Sundar Pichai and other top executives brought Google's audacious ambition into sharper focus Wednesday at an annual conference attended by more than 7,000 developers who design apps to work with its wide array of digital services. Among other things, Google unveiled new ways for its massive network of computers to identify images, as well as recommend, share, and organize photos. It also is launching an attempt to make its voice-controlled digital assistant more proactive and visual while expanding its audience to Apple's iPhone, where it will try to outwit an older peer, Siri. The push marks another step toward infusing nearly all of Google's products with some semblance of artificial intelligence -- the concept of writing software that enables computers to gradually learn to think more like humans.

It's 2017 and unless you've been living under a rock, you will have seen that Artificial Intelligence is everywhere, and having an impact on (pretty much) everything. Artificial Intelligence is the here and now; it's making leaps and bounds throughout the world of tech and beyond. But what exactly is AI and why should we be embracing it? Defining AI can be pretty tricky and is often heavily disputed. If we're speaking via textbook definitions, then we can define AI as the development of computers that can embody and perform the same so-called'intelligent' actions of humans.

Evan Nisselson is a partner at LDV Capital. Major technology companies and new startups are at war over having the most valuable artificial intelligence and at the core of this war is having unique high quality visual data. This battle will be won by owning the connected camera. The majority of the data our brains analyze is visual, and therefore the majority of the data needed for artificial intelligence to have human (or better than human) skills, will rely on the ability for computers to translate high quality visual data. One of the business sectors that will be revolutionized by artificial intelligence is e-commerce.

Artificial Intelligence can help us, dammit. The notion of a coming AI apocalypse has grown tiresome, especially because it invariably makes the leap from the nascent forms of AI we experience now to a terrifying future were every robot can out-think and, eventually, annihilate us. I'm not saying it's not an eventuality, but it is also decades or more away. It's time to focus on the now, which is why I was so pleased with Google's I/O 2017 developer's keynote on Wednesday. In it, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described the fundamental shift from a mobile-first landscape to an AI-first one. In fact, mobile hardware and software remain a crucial part of Google's strategy, but now all of it is infused, at some level, with artificial intelligence and, especially, machine learning.

Google Home--the tech giant's answer to Amazon's Alexa--can do everything from bake cookies to control your lights. Now, in its efforts to topple Amazon, Google is unrolling some new functionality: Starting this month, Google Home will be compatible with a host of appliances from Whirlpool, LG, GE, and iRobot (including some of our favorites). If you've ever wanted to check on the status of your dishwasher from the living room, or tell your oven to preheat even when your hands are busy chopping onions, Google Home might be for you. Just think of it as a friendly Skynet that just wants to help you cook and clean. Less than a year after GE baked Alexa into its appliances using the Geneva Home skill, Google and GE announced that most new GE washers, dryers, ovens, and dishwashers will now also respond to Google Home.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai talks about Google Lens, which lets you point your phone's camera at places and objects to get information about them. On Wednesday, Google kicked off its I/O developers conference with a keynote providing a peek into what the tech giant has planned for its range of services, including its artificial intelligence-powered Google Assistant. Here's what we learned from the first day of I/O: The company wants to make it easier for search users to discover job postings. Welcome to Google for Jobs, which will organize job listings more efficiently. So, if you search for, say, a software engineering job in a specific city, those listings pop up right at the top of search results.

If you are lost, you ask Siri for directions. No need to pick up the phone, there's a Domino's Pizza bot that will calm your grumbling stomach. Wondering if you need an umbrella before you leave the house? Ask Alexa about the weather (and if you don't have an umbrella, just ask Alexa to order you one). We are used to interacting with conversational agents in our personal lives, depending on them to execute the mundane tasks that we were required to do ourselves in the past.

But when I/O kicks off this Wednesday, expect Google's latest artificial intelligence efforts to be what everyone ends up talking about. If you've been paying attention over the last year or so, you've noticed that Google seems especially passionate about AI, injecting it into everything from search results to chat apps to the new Google Assistant for Android phones and the Google Home speaker. CEO Sundar Pichai has sounded especially bullish on the prospects for AI on recent company earnings calls and public interviews. That was just the beginning. Internally, Google sees AI as its next major platform after search and Android -- and it wants to give developers a way to get in early.