Over the past few weeks, Google Home has been picking up the ability to do things like order pizza and play games, but a new partnership with Hyundai looks to expand the power of the voice-powered speaker beyond our living rooms. At CES this week, Hyundai is showing off a new integration with Google Home that'll let you start or lock your car just by saying "OK, Google." According to a press release, capable Hyundai cars will be able to tap into Blue Link services like remote Start with climate control, destination search, and door lock by asking Google Assistant to perform the selected action. As the Korean carmaker explains, "Once a customer has successfully linked his or her account, Remote Service commands will only be sent to Hyundai vehicles after the Google Assistant prompts owners for their Blue Link Personal Identification Number." Hyundai will be showing off the technology at CES this week.

There has been no shortage of promises recently about how deeply the application of machine-driven artificial intelligence is expected to change our society in the next decade. Microsoft announced its ambition to conquer cancer using natural language processing to analyze research papers in close to real time. Google--now a self-proclaimed AI-first company--will make computers sound just like humans by applying machine learning to a vast corpus of human voice samples. Facebook is using AI to analyze satellite footage to locate all human life and fulfill its promise to bring the internet to the world's entire population. And the list goes on.

In preparation for the new year, PerformanceIN continues its annual tradition of connecting with performance marketing experts to get their single biggest prediction for the industry in 2017. In this piece, Steven Ledgerwood, MD at Emarsys, sees artificial intelligence being a big hit among marketers, starting from next year. Today's customer has a massive amount of choice when shopping. However, they are increasingly busy and constantly on the move, which makes it difficult for brands to stand out in an ocean of available products and offers. How can marketers create personalised offers for their customers in 2017, especially when considering the current explosion of shopping channels and enormous amounts of customer data?

If sharing is caring, then Amazon cares an awful lot about Lenovo, the Chinese electronics manufacturer that is building a version of Echo...with Amazon's blessing. Lenovo is calling its Echo clone Smart Assistant and like Echo it is powered by Amazon's Alexa digital assistant. That means users will be able to do all the same things they already can with Echo, but with a competing smart speaker that adds a bit of style to the Echo's cylindrical design. Obviously Lenovo and Amazon came to some kind of licensing agreement here, one that Amazon feels is worth the risk of cannibalizing sales of its own Echo. Or perhaps Amazon is not sweating the prospect too much considering that recent data pegs Echo sales at more than 5 million units in its first two years.

Thanks to recent gains in machine learning, computers are getting skilled at picking out patterns and features in text and images. That's how e-commerce giants like Amazon and eBay build sophisticated recommendation systems and how social networks like Facebook and Twitter are tweaking feeds to keep users hooked. Pinterest is no exception, with 30% of engagement tied to personalized real-time suggestions. Here's how Pinterest engineers are leveraging artificial intelligence to keep the website's 150 million–plus users pinning and sharing. Machine learning can not only determine the subject of an image, it can also identify visual patterns and match them to other photos.

A new year usually comes with new years resolutions, like getting fitter, reading more, and for some people, falling in love. However some singles are now joking that they'll never find their soulmate after an apparent glitch with dating app Tinder left them with no matches. The issue first started being reported by Twitter users at around 9:30am AEDT, with many tweeting the company. 'I might cry': Many users took to Twitter to complain about the problem'Tinder, why are you doing this to me? I had almost 600 matches, where are they?' one user called Connor Jordan tweeted.

After Amazon and Google, it is now Lenovo's turn to launch its own smart speakers. The company is expected to showcase the Lenovo Smart Assistant at this year's Consumer Electronics Show that kicks off Tuesday. The speakers revealed at a pre-event conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday have the same tubular design as the Amazon Echo and have Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa built in. Lenovo says it worked directly with Amazon to develop the speaker. The Lenovo Smart Assistant is not just similar to the Amazon Echo in terms of looks; it also works the same way.

Chinese firm Lenovo has created its own version of Amazon's Echo home assistant. The company announced its new Smart Assistant today at the CES technology conference in Las Vegas. The gadget, which is a similar shape to the Amazon Echo but comes in a variety of colours, uses Amazon's Alexa Voice Services and works in the same way as Amazon's own smart assistant. Chinese tech firm Lenovo has created its own version of Amazon's Echo home assistant. Lenovo says 65 per cent of people around the world already use voice recognition technology on their phone, PC or tablet.

Voice-activated speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home have become indispensable as smart assistants. Lenovo's first foray into the field aims to remedy that shortcoming. Its Smart Assistant houses Amazon's Alexa brains in hardware with Harman Kardon's audio-expert approval. These new devices manage to differentiate in both sound and style. What you gain over Amazon's hardware offering, though, is an upgraded design and presumably hardier soundscapes.

Lenovo is dipping its toe into the smart home market with two new product announcements at CES: a new smart speaker that will be powered by Amazon's Alexa Voice Service, and a wireless NAS box that that promises to help organize your digital photo library using onboard facial-recognition software. The Lenovo Smart Assistant ($130) looks like a mashup of an Amazon Echo and a Google Home, blending the former's cylindrical form factor with the latter's pastel-colored fabric speaker grill (buyers can choose light gray, green, or orange). The base model will come with a single tweeter powered by a 5-watt amplifier and a woofer driven by a 10-watt amp. Lenovo also plans to offer a Harman Kardon Edition that will come in black and be priced at $180, but the only other explanation it's provided for the $50 price bump is that the Harman model will have "an additional 2-inch sound cavity for a clearer tweeter and deeper bass." Like Amazon, Lenovo is using an array of six far-field microphones on top of the speaker to capture your voice queries and commands from any direction, but the computer manufacturer has added a second mic in the center, so there are eight in all.