As Quartz's time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas comes to a close, we have rounded up CES's best phones, TVs, concept cars, and miscellany. Rather than being focused on breakout gadgets, this year was especially homogenous, dominated by similar products competing in a few categories: We saw droves of autonomous, electric concept cars, variations on the smart speaker, and half-baked home robots. The best gadgets, listed below, were chosen because they actually managed to differentiate themselves from the herd, or seemed like real, viable products amidst a field of prototypes. Find out what you can do. Even though Amazon wasn't showing off Alexa at its own booth, the digital personal assistant stole the show as the most widely integrated technology: It was hooked up with smart speakers, refrigerators, lamps, robots, cars, and the list goes on.

Ford isn't the only auto company adding Amazon's Alexa to its cars -- Volkswagen plans to do the same. From the quick demo I had on the CES show floor, it seems like a pretty smart pairing. VW's Alexa-enabled cars will basically have full access to everything the Echo can do, but the company built its own skill to enable a handful of car-centric features. For starters, you can ask Alexa to give you the status of your car. This one is more useful when you're not actually in it, but if you're at home you can hear about whether your car is locked or unlocked, how much fuel is left, whether it's charing or not (if it's an EV), and what its approximate range is. You can then ask Alexa to lock or unlock the car or even beep the horn if you need to help someone find it.

Amazon Alexa everywhere, and that might be a problem. At CES 2017, the voice assistant kept popping up in unusual places. At a booth for smart home integrator Legrand, there were outlets used for plugging in lamps and appliances that will work with Alexa (in addition to the lights and appliances themselves). At the Dish Network booth, a demo for Alexa let me quickly change channels by voice and find Tom Hanks movies. A watch called the Martian Mvoice lets you push a button to activate Alexa.

Ten years ago, the best cell phone in the world was the Nokia N73. There was no Uber, no WhatsApp, no Instagram and no Paytm. Then came the iPhone, Android and iPad. App stores, selfies, digital assistants and digital payments followed. Now we have 4G networks, which enable us to broadcast anything to the world from anywhere on Facebook Live.

Elizabeth McGuane is lead content designer at Intercom. This year, the buzzword is without question bots. As with anything we build, we give bots names. They come pre-personified and ready for us to start that human-computer relationship, just like HAL 9000 or Her: there's Siri in our iPhones, Alexa in Amazon's Echo and there's even Facebook Messenger's PSL (Pumpkin Spice Latte) Bot. A name can be a way of expressing trust in an object -- or expressing control over it.

I don't know about you but I find technology fascinating… I do like a good tech story! So, I thought I'd put together ten crazy facts about artificial intelligence (AI). For example, think of Siri and Google Now. He published a paper called Computing Machinery and Intelligence, where he tried to figure out whether a machine could win what he called "The Imitation Game," The test had a computer try and figure out the genders of two players. A whopping 85 per cent of customer interactions won't require human customer service reps by the end of this decade.

You have the right to remain silent -- but your smart devices might not. Amazon's Echo voice-activated speaker has more "skills" than you may be using. SAN FRANCISCO -- In what may be a first, police in Arkansas asked Amazon for recordings potentially made by an Echo device in connection with a murder investigation. Police in Bentonville, Ark., asked Amazon for audio and other records from an Echo digital assistant in the home of James Andrew Bates after Victor Collins was found dead in Bates' hot tub last year, The Information reported Tuesday. Bates was charged with killing Collins on Nov. 22, 2015, according to court documents.

A live stream of two Google Home devices talking nonstop is as surreal as you'd expect. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. A live stream of two Google Home devices talking nonstop is as surreal as you'd expect.

Those incidents were all triggered by saying Alexa's name, which though inconvenient is at least the command that's supposed to trigger it. But since Alexa is always listening, it can sometimes get confused and respond to something that's not its name. The podcast Dear Hank and John, run by internet-famous Vlogbrothers duo Hank and John Green, had one listener write in to say that Alexa had sent a giant plush teddy bear in response to something John had said. This listener had asked Alexa to play the most recent episode of Dear Hank and John, and somehow interpreted a portion of the podcast (in which John discussed his refusal to use Mac keyboard and also Kenny Loggins albums) to be saying "do you like being here with your big bear?" That might not seem like a command to you, but apparently Alexa thinks that means "please order me a huge teddy bear." John went on to jokingly ask Alexa to order copies of his book The Fault in our Stars and to play the Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas album. He got at least a handful of people's Alexa's to respond.

IEEE Spectrum explains why all these robotic home assistants look the same. The LG Hub is powered by the same software that runs Amazon's Alexa, and has the additional advantage of being able to control the various LG smart home devices the makers are hoping you will buy. We'll have to wait and see whether this thing can outcompete its nearly identical, adorable foes.