An image conveys a message smarter than a thousand words – this is why visual advertisement campaigns are always more enticing. Facebook showcases videos aplenty and most of them are video ads.

Many of us check our Facebook while commuting. That is the time we browse through the video ads. Imagine if the videos pop up with a lot of sound in the background? Annoying – for you and your co-travellers, isn’t it? Facebook has come up with a smart option – play videos that communicate messages without any sound.

In October of 2015 Google quietly released one of the biggest revisions to its search engine in recent times. While most major changes to Google’s search infrastructure (nearly 500 of which are released every year) are updates and improvements to its search algorithm, this one was different. Known as RankBrain, it is a form of robotic technology, a machine learning system that could learn and evolve on its own, providing smarter, more intuitive results with a better-than-human understanding.

Google’s recent revelations that a majority of its searches comes from mobile devices comes as no surprise with more than 80% of the world’s population having access to smartphones. But what did surprise a lot of people was the fact that a significant part of those queries were voice based.For a long time, voice search flew under the radar, popping up only on iPhone ads or when you were trying to impress somebody with what your phone could do. But behind the scenes, this technology was slowly, and quietly, getting better, more powerful and smarter – really smart.