Google's Pixel is apparently a hit over at Verizon. That's a high number for a premium priced, first-time phone that isn't from Apple or Samsung. It indicates that the $15 million Google spent on advertising and $12 million from Verizon during a campaign from Oct. 27 to Nov. 2 is paying off. Google's ad campaign has played up the Pixel's photo prowess, while Verizon has regularly run an ad where a group on a train uses the Google Assistant (which has awakened my phone and Google Home more than once). However, the effort to lure Pixel owners over to T-Mobile may not be going so hot.

AI is expected to bring massive shifts in how people perceive and interact with technology, with machines performing a wider range of tasks, in many cases doing a better job than humans. That's the finding of a new report from Tractica which also outlines what the authors say will be the top tend trends in AI implementations next year. The report's authors say, the majority of use cases they studied take existing processes like predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, algorithmic trading, customer service, search engine queries, or cybersecurity threat detection and apply machine learning techniques or other AI techniques that can adapt rules and provide better results than previous static rule techniques. "At the same time, AI is also enabling new capabilities like image classification or natural language understanding, which are being plugged into photo storage solutions, or into virtual digital assistants (VDAs). The majority of the new capabilities around vision and language are new, and are being offered as incremental improvements to consumer products and services using a freemium model, rather than creating new disruptive business models."

Google Home is a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that's powered by Google Assistant, the same almost-all-knowing digital assistant that runs the show on Google's Pixel phones. With a user interface driven entirely by voice prompts, Google Home ($129 on the Google Store) can tell you about traffic and weather conditions, the latest news headlines and sports scores, and thousands of other informational tidbits. Basically, if a factoid is available via Google Search, there's a good chance Google Home can find it, and read it back to you. Google Home also lets you control other gadgets with voice commands. The list of supported devices is currently short, but includes the Nest Thermostat, Philips Hue smart bulbs and Google Chromecast.

If you've read anything about technology in the news recently you might be inclined to think that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to take over the world, leaving us mere mortals to find new ways to earn a crust. Indeed, the plethora of new services, even turning AI into its own service (AIaaS – AI as a Service), will start to redefine the way we communicate, work, and experience the world. Google's CEO Sundar Pichai has been bold enough to say "In the long run, we're evolving in computing from a'mobile-first' to an'AI-first' world".1The There's a lot that needs to happen before AI can automate entire professions, and we're seeing research that shows that jobs requiring human interaction (thankfully HR is one of these) will be the hardest to replace.2 As with any broad scale changes that affect people's livelihoods and the economies that we rely on for stability, views about the future impacts are many and varied.

Google's Pixel and Pixel XL have finally landed and both come with the fantastic Google Assistant. The AI software is like Siri, but much smarter. It uses a so-called smart reply feature to offer what Google calls "appropriate, contextually aware smart suggestions for quick replies" and it learns how you prefer to reply, in order to tailor the responses to make them more personal. This includes adding more options in the predictive text replies, or making more of spoken replies. When you first set up your Pixel phone, you will be prompted to enable Google Assistant and it will guide you through registering your voice for the "OK Google" command.

It's been hard to ignore bots and virtual assistants lately. Google is integrating its Google Assistant into its smartphones, home devices, and Allo messaging service. Amazon's smart-home Echo device is becoming an "unlikely hit" among American households, selling an estimated 3 million devices since its launch in 2014. And, of course, every day sees a new article about a new bot service, smart messaging service, or digital virtual assistant. In the coverage of bots and AI, however, everything seems to bleed together -- AI, chatbots, personal assistants, voice control, and self-driving cars.

Ryan McClead cautions against buying into the artificial intelligence hype that has taken over legal and mainstream media – not because it isn't real, but because our own conception of AI is a work in progress: Google isn't considered AI, but it'knows' what you're typing as you type, and then it filters a large portion of the web to give you the most relevant pages. It would have easily been seen as AI twenty years ago. Siri and Alexa personal assistants respond to voice commands and can return information instantly or actually perform tasks online, but they are considered borderline AI at best these days. Completely self-driving automobiles are still seen as Science Fiction and therefore are solidly in the AI column, but I predict they will NOT widely be considered AI by the time they are commercially available. AI is a moving target.

We're 30 years removed from the final episodes of the original Knight Rider, the hit series in which David Hasselhoff was aided in his crime fighting by automotive artificial intelligence assistant, KITT. But that doesn't mean that we're not still clinging on for the perfect in-car AI system -- and thanks to new Kickstarter Dashbot, we may not be waiting too much longer. Heck, it even has the quasi-retro interface working in its favor! Dashbot is a smart AI assistant, designed to be 100 percent voice-controlled so drivers keep their hands on the wheel and, just as importantly, their eyes on the road. Connecting to your smartphone via Bluetooth, it promises to be the on-the-road smart assistant we have been hankering after.

Pop culture is filled with images of crooked robots defying and defeating humans. Dystopian universes depicting raging wars between machines and mankind are legion: Asimov's writings, Hollywoodian blockbusters such as The Matrix, countless video games, etc. As evolved as we are, all of this -- thankfully -- remains fantasy. The funny thing however is that all those universes are offsprings of a human activity that is soon going to be covered by machines: Art. I believe that robots already are able to produce Art, and will be increasingly able to do so when powered by Artificial Intelligence.

Over the past four years, readers have doubtlessly noticed quantum leaps in the quality of a wide range of everyday technologies. Most obviously, the speech-recognition functions on our smartphones work much better than they used to. When we use a voice command to call our spouses, we reach them now. We aren't connected to Amtrak or an angry ex. In fact, we are increasingly interacting with our computers by just talking to them, whether it's Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, or the many voice-responsive features of Google.