It's the last day of 2016 and many of us are already planning a better 2017. And we are not alone on that. Many tech companies have plans to bring many and exciting technology trends. Some of them have already made an impact on 2016 and the new year might bring more features. Let's check the most noticeable technology trends for 2017.

Today's tech buzzword, Artificial Intelligence (AI), can be a difficult concept for many people to wrap their heads around. AI technology, which arguably holds vast potential to revolutionize the way the world works, is nonetheless often used to paint an apocalyptic view of the future. We now live in a world where talking computers and self-driving cars are no longer a thing of the future – but are we also at risk of developing computers so smart that they can replace humans? Influential tech figures such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have cautioned the industry against diving head-on into AI – because the technology's implementation could do more harm than good if we aren't careful. While there's no arguing that some of the cautionary tales around AI hold merit, our current reality is far from the robot-run society we've seen in the movies.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. If Amazon's Alexa was the finished product, I'd write it off. I couldn't honestly recommend a virtual assistant that can't even tell me how much protein is in two eggs.

LG and Samsung have really taken advantage of the calm before the CES storm by teasing out their product announcements, one by one. LG's certainly ahead in terms of sheer strangeness here, having already announced a floating speaker and a wearable speaker collar. The Seoul-based electronics giant will also apparently be showing off a bunch of robots at the show. It's not the company's first robotic rodeo, of course, having already released some robotic vacuum cleaners and, at the very least, shown off some…interesting takes on the space, including the Rolling Bot that debuted at MWC last year (below). A trio of "non-cleaning" robots teased by the company, include what sounds like a lawn mowing model, a commercial model designed to offer up travel info to humans at airports and hotels and the Hub Robot – which, from the sound of things, is a bit like a mobile Amazon Echo.

Smart devices like the Amazon Echo record snippets of conversation when they're being used. NPR's Scott Simon asks Scott Stein of CNET to explain what happens to the data that is collected.

A Tokyo-based personal insurance company announced it will replace 34 workers in its claims department with an artificial intelligence system based on IBM's infamous Watson. The system "will be tasked with reading medical certificates written by doctors and other documents to collect information necessary for making payouts, such as medical histories, length of hospital stays, and surgical procedure names," according to an English version of an article in the Japanese daily The Mainichi. "Artificial intelligence" is a slippery term that can mean everything from personal assistants like Siri, to the natural language processing done by Google, to systems modeled on the human brain that can teach themselves new skills by processing large amounts of data. In this case, the tasks that will be done by the Watson-esque system that is replacing workers at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance Co. don't sound much different from a typical computer program: scan for keywords, find values, check lookup tables, input all that information into an algorithm, spit out a recommendation. The final decision will be made by a human employee.

Clancy declined to say how much Zuckerberg may have paid Crestron for the services, though he said it was probably not a normal rate, since Facebook is a big Crestron customer and they "helped him out." Zuckerberg's engineering did add some powerful new features that Clancy said he expects will be in high demand. For one, Zuckerberg's artificial intelligence went beyond fixed phrases or hitting buttons, since it has the ability to learn. Plus, Facebook's facial recongition technology and ability to text with Facebook Messenger are unique, Clancy said, not to mention the voice by Morgan Freeman. Unlike an off-the-shelf consumer product like Google Home or Apple HomeKit, Crestron manufactures all the devices in its ecosystem and has government-facility level cybersecurity.

Amazon's 2016 has been record breaking on many fronts. The company recorded its sixth consecutive quarterly profit (previously, it mostly hemorrhaged cash). Meanwhile, this year marked Amazon's growing strength in hardware with its hit Echo home automation hub Amazon Echo, and its companion voice assistant Alexa. The company has also become force in entertainment, debuting a line of hit original shows through its Amazon Video Prime service. It's hard to imagine how Amazon could top 2016, but here are some likely moves by the Seattle-based Goliath in 2017: To save money over the past year, Amazon has been seeking to take over more shipping duties from the likes of UPS and FedEx by leasing trucks, planes, and ships.

How does the Google Pixel XL stack up against the Apple iPhone 7 Plus on three main metrics? Note that is not a comprehensive review of all the features on both phones. I will do a comprehensive long-term review later. And for the record (iPhone fans please note), I think both phones are excellent and are two of the best smartphones on the planet. Intelligent Personal Assistant: Google Personal Assistant vs. Siri: The Google Pixel is the first Android phone to use Google Assistant.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a sub-division of computer science. The main goal is to enable a smart device (e.g. First mentioned back in the 50s in the paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", written by mathematician Alan Turing, artificial intelligence is now a very popular field, and we have advanced technology to "blame" for that. This article is about learning Artificial Intelligence and we will give you a comprehensive guide that you can use as a starting point towards learning artificial intelligence. Today's AI-based computers can beat chess champions, so it's safe to say that little by little the world is taking a turn. Some people say that artificial intelligence will save humanity; others, claim it will destroy it.