HTC has finally launched one of its most anticipated phones, but it's not called HTC Ocean. Instead, the company has chosen to call it the HTC U Ultra. HTC launched two new devices in Taiwan on Thursday -- the HTC U Ultra and the HTC U Play. While the Play seems to be a budget device, the Ultra comes with new and interesting features. Although HTC has resisted from calling it the flagship device, the HTC U Ultra has features such as the Sense Companion voice assistant. The HTC U Ultra seems to be a premium device, going by its features and price.

Just when you thought HTC might be ready to hang up on its smartphone efforts, the Android underdog is turning up the volume and announcing what it describes as a "new direction" -- in the form of a series of smartphones preloaded with its own AI assistant. While mobile phones were originally a device for talking to other humans, before smartphones plus touchscreens turned devices (and people) into texting machines, analysts are spying signs of a renaissance for voice -- as a control mechanism to speed up interacting with increasingly complex devices. Every major smartphone device and OS maker has their own AI these days, from Apple's Siri, to Microsoft's Cortana, to Samsung's Viv, to Amazon's Alexa, to Google's Assistant. HTC is finally following suit, unveiling what it's calling the "HTC Sense companion" at a launch event today. The company teased the launch of the new U series smartphones last month, hinting at the "For U" personalization it had in the pipeline.

Our Adobe Research team is exploring what an intelligent digital assistant photo editing might look like. To envision this, we combined the emerging science of voice interaction with a deep understanding of both creative workflows and the creative aspirations of our customers. Our speech recognition system is able to directly accept natural user voice instructions for image editing either locally through on-device computing or through a cloud-based Natural Language understanding service. This is a first step towards a robust multimodal voice-based interface which allows our creative customers to search and edit images in an easy and engaging way using Adobe mobile applications.

Adobe announced back in November that it was investing in artificial intelligence research to further advance its creative suite of software. Yesterday, the company published a video showing what it's planning to do with its own AI digital assistant. The 30-second clip published by Adobe shows a man using what appears to be a modified version of Photoshop Express on an iPad. The app features a microphone button on the top which allows the user to initiate the digital assistant. In the demo, the user asked Adobe's digital assistant, which sounds like Siri or Alexa, to crop a photo into a square, flip the photo and flip it back again.

Lenovo is getting into the smart home market with its new Lenovo Smart Assistant. Available in May for $129, the Smart Assistant is powered by Amazon's Alexa voice system, meaning it works exactly like Amazon's own Echo and with all compatible devices. Naturally, the Smart Assistant looks a lot like Amazon's Echo thanks to its slim, cylindrical design. Lenovo's offering, however, is $50 less than Amazon's full-size Echo and has more far-field microphones, meaning it should be able to recognize your commands more accurately from a greater distance than the Echo. The Smart Assistant also features a 5-watt tweeter and 10-watt subwoofer, so music should loud and clear.

Entertainment consulting firm Accenture has been doing its digital consumers survey for about a decade, but its 2017 edition was the first to include questions around artificial intelligence and technology. And the results were surprising to the company. "There's pretty intense interest in AI this year, and a year ago there wasn't anyone talking about it," said Charles Hartley, Accenture's global media and analyst relations manager for communications, media and high-tech businesses. "Consumers aren't intimidated by it at all, apparently. The survey--which interviewed just under 26,000 consumers across 26 countries--found that 62% of people are comfortable with AI apps--like Amazon's Alexa--responding to a voice query, even though only 4% of people actually own a standalone, digital, voice-enabled device (like the Amazon Echo or Google Home) as of the end of 2016. Nearly 90% of respondents said that artificial intelligence simply makes it easier to do things, and a third said they're interested in using voice-enabled digital assistants available in smartphones. Hartley made special note of the 68% who deemed AI "less biased" than humans and the 64% who said AI "communicates more politely." More than half said AI is "less likely to make a mistake." Meanwhile, on Jan. 11, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the journalism-centric Knight Foundation and others announced they've created a $27 million fund to research AI applications for the public, with MIT's Media Lab and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University serving as academic research stations. The hope is to bring in a wide range of tech and academic voices to the future of AI applications, the groups said in a statement. "Artificial intelligence agents will impact our lives in every society on Earth.

Across customer experiences, marketing and business it was a year with many inflection points. Understanding them will help us better gauge how it will gain even more traction in 2017. Five years after the debut of Siri on the iPhone 4S, Apple's new AirPods gave new life to its virtual assistant. Amazon and Google have brought AI into our living rooms in a massive way – this past holiday season, Amazon sold millions of Alexa devices worldwide. Smart brands were at the ready to take advantage of that winter bounty: Jamie Oliver, National Rail, Spotify, and Just Eat all offered useful skills for Alexa.

If CES was any indication, voice control and virtual assistants will rule in 2017. While some companies seem to be adding the tools just for the sake of doing so, others are finding some implementations that could actually be useful. Adobe falls into the latter category and the company is showing off what it calls "a first step" towards voice-controlled edits in its design apps. In a short YouTube clip, a man uses an Alexa or Siri-like virtual assistant to lend a hand with some basic edits. When directed to do so, the software crops and flips an image on an iPad before taking a step back.

What trends are we likely to see in ad tech in 2017? With the success of Amazon Echo and Google Home, we are now firmly in the era of Voice Search. But the Pay Per Impression and Pay Per Click models do not translate well here, and Pay Per Call type ads (launched for mobile by Google in 2015) would be controversial, to say the least. After all, you would have to wonder if the top search result delivered to you truly was the best one or merely from the advertiser who paid the most. Which is why Google -- and very likely others in this space -- are considering Pay Per Transaction, in what would be the biggest shift in advertising in years.

It's difficult to describe in a concise list with less than 1,000 words what the definitive direction of artificial intelligence is going to be in a 12-month span. Clearly, I say all of this because I am attempting to write just such a list. If you think something belongs on this list or want to contribute your own ideas based on your own expertise and personal opinion, please feel free to contact us at info@geektime.com. In the meantime, here are the four trends that will dominate artificial intelligence in 2017. We could call this "natural language processing" or NLP, but let's think more broadly about language for a moment.