LG kicked off the second press day of the Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday with a 45-minute keynote featuring robots, consumer appliances, and more products. One of the first announcements LG made Wednesday was that all of its appliances going forward will be Wi-Fi enabled. The aim is to connect them to the company's DeepThinq artificial intelligence features. The connection means that the appliances will be able to improve their performance for individual users over time based on the data gathered through their use. For example, the company's robotic vacuum cleaner will learn what obstacles look like and how to avoid them, and its washing machines will automatically adjust their wash cycles to match water conditions.

According to a set of intelligent humans interviewed for this story, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are going to help drive the tech economy in 2017. When CIO.com posted a query on Help a Reporter Out, a site designed to help journalists connect with sources, asking about startup trends to watch in 2017, the overwhelming majority of respondents pointed to AI. This coming year and beyond, AI will help companies "disrupt sectors that haven't been fully disrupted," says Anthony Glomski, principal of AG Asset Advisory, a financial advisory firm. "AI is in its beginning stages with massive potential impact." Here are eight startup categories and trends experts believe will be big in 2017.

How would you feel about a smart, Wi-Fi-connected speaker named after a Greek philosopher helping raise your child? Toymaker Mattel is planning Aristotle by Nabi, a smart baby monitor device that can also interact with your toddler-- or kid, or tween. Aristotle is designed to be something like an Amazon Alexa or a Google Home, but programmed for children. Put another way, the hub is "an AI to help raise your child," as Fast Company described it. Mattel said that Aristotle could play a crying child a lullaby, and parents, meanwhile, could use the same speaker to order things through Amazon's Alexa voice assistant.

Among many products showcased at LG's CES 2017 press conference Wednesday, the manufacturer announced a line up of robots for both home and public spaces. First, the Hub Robot is LG's answer to devices including Amazon Echo and Google Home. The AI gateway connects IoT devices within the home. Users can communicate with the robot to execute specific tasks. Other home robots include the Hom-Bot vacuum cleaning robot, which can detect objects in its cleaning path as well as people.

Tech news these days is dominated by stories on the relentless march of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it will impact our lives in the very near future. The dream is that smart machines will rise to handle all the daily tasks, leaving us free to focus on truly valuable work. Consequently, these stories are diverging from the standard of driverless cars, drones and personal assistant bots like Siri, Alexa and Watson into the realm of personal financial assistants. The technology to facilitate these tasks is certainly not new, but like all innovation, it has become cheaper, faster, more ubiquitous and simply better. By combining AI bots with big data analysis, financial institutions can formulate powerful, yet personalized, advice and recommendations that promise to open up banking with equitable service levels for all, not just the high net worth clientele.

Now that 2017 has officially started, we are looking forward to exploring the latest technologies and how they will impact our lives. It's clear that AI will infuse everything and it's expected to impact all industries including: healthcare, energy, transportation, and retail! One area expected to grow exponentially are virtual assistants. With the already established existence of Siri, Cortana and Google Now, we will see conversational agents becoming more and more personalized. The market is expected to grow drastically over the next few years and we'll be showcasing advances in virtual assistants and artificial intelligence from the world's leading innovators at the Virtual Assistant Summit on 26-27 January in San Francisco.

Last year, LG brought a refrigerator to CES that ran Windows 10, showing the a world a device that could keep food cold and play minesweeper. Specifically, LG's new icebox is a full-on Amazon Alexa device. Think of it as a really big Amazon Echo. Amazon Echo VP Mike George says the refrigerator will offer the "full Alexa experience," including the ability to check weather, play music, tell jokes and, of course, order food from Amazon Prime Pantry. It sounds almost a little silly -- why not simply have an Echo in the Kitchen -- but it's kind of neat when considered alongside the InstaView's other features.

"What do you want to ask Google?" my wife asked our toddler after installing Google Home. "Everything," he responded in the most casual and sincere way. Of course a young human with endless questions would have endless queries for an internet service with endless answers. But over the course of dinner, as he did his best to yell to the machine, "Okay, Google, how fast do lions run?" and "Okay, Google, how far is our moon?" I realized its flaw: Google's voice assistant understood me perfectly, thanks to endless waves of machine learning from adults asking it questions everyday.

Some of the hottest tech coming to CES this year includes home robots, Super UHD TVs, and the latest in PCs. Artificial intelligence in the home has been making big gains at CES over the last several years, according to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) in a statement released Tuesday. CTA projects 2017 unit sales for voice-controlled, stand-alone digital assistant devices with a cloud-based operating system -- including Amazon's Echo and Google Home -- to reach 4.5 million units, a 52 percent increase, and reach $608 million in revenue, up 36 percent. And with home robots, companies at CES in 2017 will be looking to upstage intelligent home assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo. Kuri: This home robot from Mayfield Robotics is all about personality.

Amazon's Alexa assistant can already communicate with some cars, but the conversations are a little one-sided. You can tell your home-bound Echo to start warming up your Hyundai on a frosty day, for example, or send directions to your BMW ahead of setting off; but when you're on the road, you're on your own. Later this year, though, car makers will be able to put Alexa in the passenger seat, giving drivers a virtual assistant that'll put on some tunes, load up an audiobook and carry out many other tasks while their hands are stuck to the wheel. This won't be a result of individual car brand partnerships, however. Instead, Inrix is working to integrate Alexa into its OpenCar platform, which vehicle manufacturers can take and shape into their own, branded infotainment systems -- similar to BlackBerry's QNX platform, which could be powering your ride's dash even if you don't know it.