You may not know it yet, but our music is already highly reliant on artificial intelligence. AI is already being deployed to develop music scores for advertisements and movies. Artificial Intelligence is also finding itself developing mood based music for games and smartphone apps. While they don't produce music themselves, Siri and Cortana are at our disposal if we need music suggestions. The same goes for streaming services such as Spotify, which rely on AI to deliver new music to our tastes.

Many people depend on Skype to chat with family, colleagues and clients throughout their working day. To help them stay connected while they're outside the office, Volvo has announced plans to integrate Skype for Business into its high-end 90 Series cars. Accessible through a large touchscreen dashboard, drivers will see a list of scheduled meetings and a shortcut to their complete contact list. Tapping once will reveal a meeting summary, including the organiser, participants and the ways in which they can join the call. A "Join Meeting" shortcut will reside at the bottom so users can quickly dial in -- no pesky pin codes required (hopefully).

FILE - This July 29, 2015, file photo shows Amazon's Echo speaker, which responds to voice commands, in New York. A prosecutor investigating the death of a man whose body was found in a hot tub wants to expand the probe to include a potential new kind of evidence: the suspect's Amazon Echo smart speaker. Amazon has called the request "overbroad or otherwise inappropriate." FILE - This July 29, 2015, file photo shows Amazon's Echo speaker, which responds to voice commands, in New York. A prosecutor investigating the death of a man whose body was found in a hot tub wants to expand the probe to include a potential new kind of evidence: the suspect's Amazon Echo smart speaker.

Global funding for fintech firms increased over the last year, and traditional banking institutions experienced disruption as fintechs developed new banking technologies and business models that are driving industry-wide change. It's an exciting time, and the implications for the future of financial services are promising. In this rapidly changing climate, industry stakeholders may wonder what to expect in the coming months. As the year comes to a close, we've rounded up our top five predictions for fintech in 2017. Banking is becoming an increasingly digital experience, and 2017 promises to continue the trend of replacing branch visits with convenient, intuitive digital experiences.

This year, many of us let a stranger into our homes and ended up loving it. I am, of course, talking about voice-activated artificial-intelligence assistants. The success of Amazon's Alexa, the launch of Google's Home, and Mark Zuckerbrg's public quest to build his own digital butler all demonstrate that conversational interfaces, which we predicted would be a breakthrough technology in 2016, are here to stay. Amazon's Echo smart speaker, which is a conduit for the company's Alexa AI assistant, was officially available to all in the U.S. from 2015. But this year it also went on sale in the U.K. and Germany, and estimates suggest that it sold as many as two million units in the first nine months of 2016.

The gold rush for artificial intelligence (AI) is officially in full swing. Big players like Google and Facebook and small teams alike are in an all-out sprint toward the goal of creating the next generation of AI assistants that will fundamentally change how we live and work. I am in awe at the pace of progress, because every week it feels like a new barrier is breached, a tool grows more robust, or a new startup is launched with the ability to transform an industry. However, the most surprising observation continues to be people's underestimation of AI. Specifically how the general population seems so unable, or unwilling, to imagine that a machine could ever match a human's ability in any job -- particularly their own.

MIAMI – Amazon's connected personal assistant Alexa may have witnessed a murder. Investigators in Arkansas recovered the Amazon Echo speaker infused with artificial intelligence from a murder scene, and want to know what Alexa heard, according to lawyers on both sides. The case centers around Victor Collins, 47, who was found strangled in November 2015 in a bathtub of the Bentonville home of James Bates, who is accused of the crime. In the investigation, an officer found an Amazon Echo device at Bates's house -- the small cylinder-shaped speaker that responds to voice commands under the name "Alexa." Prosecutors have obtained a search warrant that would require Amazon to release any relevant data from the device, according to a statement from Benton County prosecutor Nathan Smith.

Leading tech companies ship AI free within their products (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant), powering our phones and the rapidly growing home personal assistant market. Indeed, they are becoming increasingly good at answering our questions, making us smarter. Teaching not rote facts and figures, but instead teaching students the paths to find this knowledge on their own. Teaching students -- as we do with computers through AI -- how to learn. We are stuck with centuries old methodologies, where schools and teachers act like the gateway to knowledge, but at a time when students can access all they want by simply asking Alexa.

Though it's been around for a few years, voice artificial intelligence systems are slowly becoming a staple of the automated household. While there are still many holdouts, resistance to this technology is fading and more people are buying it to explore the possibilities. Not only do these systems understand your vocal commands, but they also respond and are starting to mimic human speech. Who knew that a talking computer could make things so much easier, but let's see what these products can do and where the technology is heading. Most of these products are "smart speakers."

FILE - This July 29, 2015, file photo shows Amazon's Echo speaker, which responds to voice commands, in New York. A prosecutor investigating the death of a man whose body was found in a hot tub wants to expand the probe to include a potential new kind of evidence: the suspect's Amazon Echo smart speaker. Amazon has called the request "overbroad or otherwise inappropriate."