It's a brand new year, and by most reliable indicators – the latest demos at CES 2017, the buzz on all the tech blogs and even the pre-roll ads interrupting my binge watching of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – it looks like 2017 will be the year that voice interaction reaches mainstream adoption. Voice interaction – the ability to speak to your devices, and have them understand and act upon whatever you're asking them – was everywhere this year. Device manufacturers of all shapes and sizes heavily integrated voice capabilities into their offerings at CES 2017, with Amazon's Alexa stealing the show as their AI platform of choice. The rapid proliferation of voice interaction capabilities in our individual digital ecosystems raises critical questions for any designer whose work plays a role in the customer experience. It's becoming clear that voice interaction will soon become an expected offering as either an alternative, or even a full replacement to, traditional visual interfaces.

MyPolly is the world's first product that introduces continuous conversation via natural language understanding. MyPolly, which is currently in closed beta testing for developers and bot builders, enables virtual assistants and bots to interpret a human's input, making MyPolly "smarter" over time. Jack Crawford, Founder and CEO of datalog.ai and Malaikannan Sankarasubbu, Founder and CTO, started the company last year to equip bots and virtual assistants to intelligently remember associations between words and things. For example, you might say to your virtual assistant, "My dog's name is Sebastian." Later in the dialogue, MyPolly would recall your dog's name.

The little talking speaker that could, Amazon's Echo, is moving into the breakout phase of its success, according to data collected by analysts firm Slice Intelligence. The Echo is coming off a tremendously successful holiday shopping season, which saw not only a high volume of sales, but a key evolution in consumer demographics that's driving sales from a broader cross-section of buyers. Slice found that 50 percent of revenue related to Echo came from women, a trend which is a big change from the patterns at device launch, when overwhelming men tend to be the ones buying Echo. Slice identified this tendency originally around the launch of the first Echo, and now again during this most recent holiday season around the release of the new Echo Dot. That's not the only sign that Echo is going mainstream, however.

Apple continues to work on software updates for its range of products. The Apple Watch is of course part of this range. The Cupertino giant's smartwatch is designed to be a high-tech timepiece that serves as the perfect companion to the iPhone. A vital part of the watch is Apple's voice-activated assistant Siri. In an upcoming update, Siri is getting a new functionality that users will surely like.

Autonomous cars, personal assistants, and robots that give yoga lessons. For better or worse, the world of AI has arrived. In the beginning of January, businesses and journalists of all sorts converged on Las Vegas for the annual CES conference for consumer electronics and consumer technologies. While many of the products showcased and announced during the four-day hullabaloo aren't of particular interest to us--8k TVs and virtual reality headsets, for example--we were intrigued by the significant presence of artificial intelligence products this year. It permeated just about every type of product, and, for many businesses, is at their forefront of their efforts moving into 2017 and beyond.

Competition may be good for the soul, but so is collaboration. Samsung said at an earnings call earlier Wednesday that working with its often-partner, sometimes-rival Google will make artificial intelligence better on a range of devices. "Samsung and Google will have to continue to maintain their strategic partnership to nurture the AI and the market for the emerging technology," Samsung Mobile VP Lee Kyeong-tae said, as reported by The Investor, a South Korean publication associated with The Korea Herald. The call to collaborate comes at a time when Samsung is rumored to bring the AI assistant "Bixby" to its Galaxy S8 phone this April. The use of AI is heating up on phones, with phonemakers from Huawei to HTC introducing their own takes.

Beginning Thursday, gamers on both Windows 10 PCs and the Xbox One will start receiving a boatload of new gaming features that will roll out over the coming days as part of their respective Insider programs. PC gamers arguably have the most to get excited about. A Game Mode to custom-configure your PC for games, a new dedicated Games menu within Windows 10's Settings, and Beam game livestreaming will form a trifecta of improvements. Xbox owners have already seen Microsoft roll out more general UI improvements to the Xbox dashboard, plus an aggressive new program to segment Xbox users into four different grades of access. With the new updates, Microsoft has upgraded the Cortana digital assistant with new commands and added a Screentime feature that can manage the time that kids use the Xbox.

If you recently purchased an Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or Amazon Tap you might be left wondering "Well, now what?" Nothing to fear, my friend. There's a lot to get through in order to get a smart assistant to do the heavy lifting of your home automation. And while we've gone over the seemingly endless list of everything that works with Alexa, there are some fundamental settings you might want to familiarize yourself with first. Below you'll find a step-by-step guide on how to manage your new Alexa-enabled device. The first thing you'll see when you get into the Settings tab of the Alexa mobile app or at alexa.amazon.com is a list of some pretty generic settings.

Whether it's opening Google Maps for directions, shopping on Amazon, or watching movies on Netflix, 2016 was the year that bots truly hit mainstream. This seismic development -- which has critical implications for businesses, consumers, and, indeed, humankind -- is the result of three developments that came to a head in 2016: First, an unprecedented capacity to analyze data; second, a backlash (limited though it was) to protect what data can be analyzed; and third, a welcoming of automation into our lives that we couldn't have fathomed even a few years ago. At this moment, we have more data than ever before. We're creating information at a bewildering pace -- approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, which is enough to fill 57.5 billion iPads (at 32 gigabytes apiece). Big data is now a given, affecting every industry and function.

When young children have free rein over Alexa, Amazon's voice-enabled virtual assistant, hijinx inevitably ensue.