The days of journeying to a travel agency and sitting at the desk of an agent just to book a trip have all but disappeared, but technology is increasingly putting that level of personalized service in the palms of our hands. A number of travel apps have begun to incorporate artificial intelligence, technology that allows machines to analyze large amounts of data and "learn" on their own, according to Greg Oates, senior editor at travel site Skift. The technology can help machines outperform traditional search engines and real humans (including travel agents) in speed and efficiency, he said. "The holy grail for travel brands today is personalizing the guest experience," he said. "Artificial intelligence really helps with that because it can crunch so much data and connect dots around users so much faster than traditional search."

LG's Hub Robot can do things like turn on the air conditioning and delay the start of your washing machine with a simple voice command. The robot uses Amazon Alexa voice recognition, but unlike Amazon's Echo, the Hub can link to LG's smart appliances. Its display doubles as both a face that can show emotions. The robot is meant to be set up at a central point in a home, such as the kitchen or living room. Miniature versions of the robot are also available for other rooms.

Some come to CES for the self-driving cars and smart sprinkler systems; media companies and advertisers are in Las Vegas to talk voice and artificial intelligence. And pour some cold water on virtual reality. Thanks to products like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, it's impossible to escape the growing hype behind voice technology and artificial intelligence from both publishers and advertisers alike. Turner Sports, for instance, has launched Catch Sports, a "digital personal assistant" available on smartphones and the Amazon Echo that tells you where you can watch or listen to a game as well as the latest scores. Publicis Groupe, meanwhile, went even further by having a robot give a full powerpoint presentation -- a "proof of concept" to demonstrate how voice and AI will impact everything from medicine to day-to-day tasks at ad agencies.

A scarf designed to filter out harmful elements in city air. A breast pump that fits into a bra and keeps track of pumping volume. A drone that can dive into water and help anglers catch a big one. CES 2017, the consumer tech event held in Las Vegas this week, featured vendors with automated baubles, humanoid robots and "smart" everything -- a dishwasher, hairbrush and lawnmower, to name a few. But it's not so much the gadgets as their underlying technology that will make CIOs -- who seek out new tools for business, not the home or yard -- stop, look and listen.

According to Gartner's latest report, Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach $3.5 trillion in 2017, up 2.9 percent from 2016's estimated spending of $3.4 trillion. Additionally, IT services spending is also set to rise 4.8 percent in 2017 to reach $943 billion. All of these figures tell us that many organizations have already allocated billions of dollars to keep up with the emerging trends in enterprise technology. One of our CMS-Connected contributors and a founding partner of Digital Clarity Group, Cathy McKnight, wrote a splendid article about the relationship between artificial intelligence and marketers. She also pointed out that more and more of the technology titans have adopted and leveraged the power of AI to enable their platforms to generate natural language, content optimization, analyze consumer behavior, and ultimately, be ahead of the game by knowing more about their customers' needs than even the customers know themselves.

If 2016 seemed politically tumultuous, 2017 promises to be equally tumultuous on the technology front. The pace of change is accelerating at a dizzying rate, with profound implications for the way we work, play and communicate. So what are the big technology trends to watch out for in 2017? Cybersecurity will undoubtedly be the dominant theme of 2017, as all tech innovations could be undermined by data thefts, fraud and cyber propaganda. Forget Kim Kardashian, it's hacking that could break the internet - and much more besides.

What major advances do you foresee in artificial intelligence in 2017? Despite the impressive progress that machine learning made in 2016, AI systems remain specialists: they cannot add new skills to their repertoires without erasing what they already know. This is the problem of catastrophic forgetting. An AI trained to recognise faces in photographs, for example, would not apply well to another visual task, such as recognising street signs. Each system would need to be trained for its own limited task.

In November 2015, a former Georgia police officer named Victor Collins was found floating facedown in a hot tub owned by Bentonville resident James Andrew Bates. There were traces of blood at the scene, and a coroner later determined that Collins had died of strangulation and partial drowning. The smart water meter installed at Bates' house indicated that 140 gallons of water -- much more than usual -- had been used on the night of Collins' death. That pointed to post-murder cleaning. There was physical evidence at the scene, but the prosecutor wanted to know if there was more information hiding on the Amazon Echo that had been streaming music when Collins died.

First off, I think they are both fantastic devices. Your biggest loss is not getting either. Echo has many more 3rd party integrations at present, and has better support for some of my IOT devices and Audiobooks. Also, the Echo has Bluetooth, which is lacking on the Home, and I sometimes miss that. Go try out both of them and pick whichever one is better for your needs, though whatever you do, definitely get one of them.

Every year at CES, some of the world's biggest tech companies try to one-up each other. TVs get thinner and brighter. Home appliances get chattier and robots get friendlier. But this year, instead of standing out for their memorable devices, a lot of companies showed up with a shared identity: the voice of Alexa. Within a span of just two years, Amazon's cloud-based voice service has spread far beyond the Echo speaker where it first debuted.