Google Home and Amazon's Echo are the most famous, but a whole raft of these gadgets is preparing to flood the market. One of the most advanced will likely come from Baidu, the Chinese tech giant that, like Google, began as a search engine and now has its tendrils in all sorts of digital and physical spaces. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief AI scientist, calls these devices "conversational computers," and he's a key reason any of them have learned to talk in the first place. A former AI researcher at Stanford, Ng is best known for spearheading the Google Brain initiative, an ambitious artificial-intelligence project that helped advance Silicon Valley's understanding of deep-learning techniques. Instead of being programmed to respond to specific actions, a deep learning system is fed massive amounts of data from which it is able to discern patterns over time, loosely mimicking how the human mind absorbs information. Ng's system at Google famously figured out what a cat looks like after scanning millions of online images.

Amazon's Echo and Dot connected speakers are sold out, and 35 new products will have Alexa built-in this year. Did Alexa win over Siri, Cortana and Hey Google? LOS ANGELES -- Apple's Siri has been around five years, but Amazon's Alexa is the coolest kid on the voice- computing block now. At least, so it seemed at this month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where many manufacturers touted their Alexa functionality as a major selling for 35 new product introductions, including a car, refrigerator, smartphone, robot, Internet router and vacuum cleaner. "There's a real hunger for the next big thing," says Benedict Evans, a partner with investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. "It was web apps, then bots, and now it's voice interfaces."

When looking for a date online, it can be difficult to get a proper idea of what potential suitors are really like just by looking at their photos. But that could be set to change, with the introduction of a new video feature on Bumble. The dating app is set to launch BumbleVID, allowing users to create a story of 10-second videos, which will delete after 24 hours. Users will record 10-second videos directly within Bumble, which are posted to their profile. The videos can be viewed by anyone who comes across the profile while swiping.

A ROBOT companion for older people aims to promote activity and tackle loneliness by nudging them to take part in digital and physical activities. A prototype of the ElliQ robot, made by Israel-based start-up Intuition Robotics, will be unveiled at the Design Museum in London this week. ElliQ is a small desktop device that consists of a stylised domed "body" and a separate detachable screen. Created in collaboration with Swiss designer Yves Béhar, the robot is able to tilt and turn to indicate what it is doing and encourage a degree of social engagement. Similar to home assistants like the Amazon Echo, people can simply talk to it, and there are visual cues that could be particularly helpful for those with hearing difficulties. A key purpose of ElliQ is to act as an easy interface to access existing services such as social media, messaging programs, and audio and video streaming.

Amazon's Echo and Dot connected speakers are sold out, and 35 new products will have Alexa built-in this year. Did Alexa win over Siri, Cortana and Hey Google?

Digital marketing has become the largest media channel by spend for the first time, a development that will challenge marketers, platforms and agencies to step up with truly engaging experiences tailored for customers and different delivery mechanisms or risk frittering away their investment. Following a year fraught with scandals and broken trust, marketers will buckle down in 2017 and do the hard work required to improve metrics and business relationships while focusing on creating engagements that are not intrusive, but rather personalized, contextual and enriching. Without these steps, consumers are likely to increasingly turn to ad blockers and premium ad-free services. "In 2017, digital will become the single largest media investment channel, passing television for the first time," Scott Symonds, managing director of media at AKQA, told Marketing Dive. "This will be a symbolic turning point for a trend that has been building for years and will make it that much more obvious to all marketers that digital is no longer just a test or an innovation budget. It needs to be expected to work as hard or harder vs. every other investment channel."

When it comes to smartphones, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be the next big thing. Most smartphone companies are either building their own AI-based voice assistants or lending it from someone else. Samsung is reportedly working on its own voice assistant named Bixby, which will be a replacement for the company's S-Voice functionality. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have the Assistant, Cortana and Alexa, respectively, while Huawei is borrowing Alexa from Amazon. Unlike many other functionalities that are similar across smartphones, there is room for customization when it comes to voice assistants.

If you've owned a smartphone from the past five years then you've probably used an Intelligent Personal Assistant. Even though there are dozens (possibly hundreds or even thousands) of digital assistants, the most commonly used are Apple's Siri, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Assistant. But how do they work? An Intelligent Personal Assistant or virtual assistant is an AI-based technology. The software uses a device's microphone to listen to a user's request while the speaker is used to give a verbal response.

Though artificial intelligence experts may cringe at the portrayals of humanlike AI in science fiction, some researchers are nudging us closer to those visions. "I think it's useful that your user interface not only understand your emotions, your personality, your tone, your motivations, but that it also have a set of emotions, personality, motivations," says Rob High, the CTO of IBM Watson. "I think that makes it more natural for us." Last month, High's company unveiled Project Intu, an experimental platform that allows developers the ability to build internet of things devices using its artificial intelligence services, like Conversation, Language and Visual Recognition. Someday, the system promises to let programmers create a staple character of sci-fi: the gregarious, hyper-connected AI like J.A.R.V.I.S. of Iron Man, KITT of Knight Rider, or Star Wars' C3PO.

For years, we have been fed an almost constant diet of sci-fi prediction about the consequences of artificial intelligence and our deepening lack of self-reliance. Be it at the hands of vengeful robots, octopedal searcher drones or an omnipresent networked villainous super-brain; we are just fleshy victims waiting to be usurped. Well, the age of artificial intelligence is upon us and predictably, a debate rages on. Ironically, considering the warnings that assail us across the airwaves, one of the realms that is embracing AI is the financial services industry. In 2008, several small technology-oriented startups stole headlines with their move into fully automated investment services.