The 100 greatest innovations of 2017 - The year's most transformative products and discoveries.

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Grand Award Winner for Software: A program to help moderators handle toxic comment sections.

Perspective
• This AI flushes out trolls—Perspective

Hate and harassment flourish in online comment sections. To keep these digital forums open, Jigsaw—a ­division of Google’s parent ­company, Alphabet—built Perspective, a ­machine-learning system that scores readers’ written thoughts from 1 to 100, based on how likely they are to be toxic. You may have noticed that since June, more articles on The New York Times’ website allow people to post their opinions. That’s because the Times—which contributed millions of annotated comments to train the system—employed Perspective to help its human moderators handle the remarks more efficiently. By year’s end, editors hope to have opened up 80 percent of all articles for (non-toxic) discussion.


• Bot that knows your voice—Google Assistant

In April, the Google Assistantbecame the first virtual persona with the ability to differentiate people—as many as six—based on their voices. After training it (via a Google Home device) to learn what makes your vocal sounds unique, ask it to read your schedule. You’ll hear only your own appointments, not your partner’s.


• Unseen security guard—Invisible recaptcha

Proving you’re a human online can be a pain in the bot. Who wants to deal with a string of numbers or letters—or even a checkbox—when you’re just trying to fill out a form? In March, Google cut us all a break with its Invisible  Recaptchaservice. Working in the background, this gatekeeper uses risk analysis and machine learning while you do nothing. If it gets suspicious, the system might still make you take a captcha test.


• Your smile’s the ticket—Face recognition

In June, passengers jaunting off to Aruba from Boston with JetBlue could keep their boarding passes and passports tucked away—that’s because the carrier started accepting flyers’ faces as ID. A camera at the gate snaps a photo of each participating traveler, and then a U.S. Customs and Border Protection algorithm matches it against a photo of the traveler’s visage on file, giving each voyager the green light (or not).


• When AI is the dating coach—Smart photos

Choosing your Tinder profile photo used to be angst-inducing, but now a machine-learning algorithm can do it for you. The system rotates which picture leads, figuring out the popularity of each based on people’s responses. With image recognition, Tinder can even determine how an individual swiper might react to a certain photo, meaning it can custom-select a specific selfie to present to a potential date.


• Made for the future, and past—Horizon Zero Dawn

The developers behind this gorgeous, post-apocalyptic video  gamedesigned it to take advantage of the Sony PlayStation 4 Pro’s copious processing power, but also ensured that it still shines on older consoles. On Sony’s latest gaming machine and a 4K monitor, you’ll get high-res visuals and HDR colors, but even on a standard PS4, you’ll still enjoy smoother gameplay and more details as you hunt giant machines.


• Knocking JPEG off its throne—MPEG

Since 1992, JPEG has quietly ruled as the prevailing photo-compression standard. But that might change with the high-efficiency image file format (HEIF), which Apple baked into  iPhones running iOS 11and Macs operating High Sierra. Not only can HEIF store multiple shots and audio in a single file, photographs will take up less space and pack in more colors. With a greater range of hues, skies will appear smoother.