The'Internet of Things' is a name given to exponential technologies encompassing our physical devices, vehicles, home appliances and increasingly normal everyday objects such as water bottles, that can store and exchange data. For consumers, they are often fearful of these advances and question how secure their personal data is. To overcome this issue, consumers must self-educate about personal security, moving away from a naive perspective and become mature, responsible agents when operating these data-storing devices. They discuss the implications of the Internet of Things (IoT) and what the future holds – not just for businesses but also consumers. 'Artificial Intelligence' has materialised much faster than leading researchers and security professionals in the field expected, and the future of it remains unknown.

Some people already talk to Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa like she's a real person, setting her up for jokes, and having conversations that go way beyond the basic commands like "Alexa, play'Hurt' by Nine Inch Nails." And that's how people are treating a disembodied voice. But what if you could see her -- and what if she looked disturbingly human? Magic Leap, an augmented-reality startup, introduced the next evolution of the virtual assistant at their conference earlier this month. Mica performs many of the same functions as Alexa or Apple's Siri, but when users wear Magic Leap's augmented reality glasses, they can also see her incredibly life-like avatar.

Amazon and SiriumXM have partnered up to bring together streaming radio and the Amazon Echo. Echo owners can enjoy a three-month trial of SiriusXM for free. And anyone who signs up for a new SiriusXM All Access or SiriusXM Premier subscription will get an Echo Dot for free. Current customers who upgrade from SiriusXM Select to Sirius XM All Access will also receive an Echo Dot for free. While SiriusXM satellite radio is popular in cars, this partnership with Amazon will help bring the service into more homes.

One of the new features introduced at last month's Amazon hardware event was the ability to whisper to your Amazon Echo device -- and have Alexa whisper back to you. Amazon confirmed to Engadget that this feature, called "whisper mode," is now rolling out to US users. Whisper mode will likely be most useful around children, whether it's to get the kids in the mindset that it's bedtime and they should be quiet, or to avoid waking a sleeping child. The idea behind this feature is training Alexa to recognize conversational cues. For example, if you were having a conversation with someone and lowered your voice to a whisper, the person would naturally respond in-kind.

Hossein Rahnama knows a CEO of a major financial company who wants to live on after he's dead, and Rahnama thinks he can help him do it. Rahnama is creating a digital avatar for the CEO that they both hope could serve as a virtual "consultant" when the actual CEO is gone. Some future company executive deciding whether to accept an acquisition bid might pull out her cell phone, open a chat window, and pose the question to the late CEO. The digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligence platform that analyzes personal data and correspondence, might detect that the CEO had a bad relationship with the acquiring company's execs. "I'm not a fan of that company's leadership," the avatar might say, and the screen would go red to indicate disapproval.

Facebook wants to you to spend $199 to $349 to install its version of a connected, talking video speaker – such as Amazon's Echo – into your home. It has a camera that follows you as you move for video calls and the ability to track what you're doing. In announcing the Portal product (as in "Hey, Portal,") Facebook bent over backward to assure consumers that it takes your privacy seriously. That strategy took several steps backward Wednesday with the admission that yes, indeed, Facebook did want to track your calls and sell ads based on the data elsewhere on Facebook. Thank you for this beautiful, wooden horse, Facebook!

While voice-enabled assistants like Siri and Alexa have made the lives of millions of Americans a little easier, the software systems they run on are not great at accommodating a particular group of users: those with speech disabilities and impairments. This means that the "7.5 million people" who "have trouble using their voice" and the "more than 3 million people" who stutter in the U.S. are largely being left out of the voice-assistant revolution. This lack of accessibility becomes even more glaring when you consider that many individuals with speech disabilities also have limited mobility and motor skills, meaning they might benefit more from such digital assistants. Moira Corcoran reports on the smaller tech companies and startups that have started to work on software that's more inclusive of all speech, and what larger firms like Amazon and Microsoft have to say about making more individualized and accessible technologies. Elsewhere on Slate, we've been focusing on the politics of social media.

Facebook's decision to launch a camera-equipped listening device for people's living rooms, just months after one of the biggest data scandals in history, was greeted with a fair amount of suspicion. Given that Facebook's business model relies on using people's data to serve them personalised ads, it seemed fair to assume that the Portal smart speaker could serve a purpose beyond simply acting as a voice-activated home assistant that can handle video calls. Yet Facebook assured people that "no data collected through Portal – even call log data or app usage data, like the fact that you listen to Spotify – will be used to target users with ads on Facebook." Within days of announcing this claim, however, Facebook was forced to backtrack. If you haven't done this already, do it now. In Settings, hit the Privacy tab.

Everything started from a conversation with a friend who one day during lunch told me "How stupid and limited Siri is. I ask her a question, and she gave me an answer. And it is so boring that I stopped using her for searching stuff. I use her only for weather and other shortcuts." "Why would you say so? Technology came a long way nowadays. You have the entire world in a metal container" I told him.

Unlike VR, when you're talking about augmented reality, describing what an experience is like can be incredibly difficult -- primarily because the experiences are even more contextual than relatively static virtual worlds that don't involve real-world settings. In AR, everything is about how "you" see things interacting with your real environment. Such is the case with what I'm calling the most important demonstration of Magic Leap technology to date in the form of an AI assistant called Mica. The experience was previewed on stage during Wednesday's keynote event at the L.E.A.P. conference in Los Angeles by Magic Leap's John Monos, vice president of human-centered AR and dDNA, and Andrew Rabinovich, the company's head of AI. Together, the team described a world in which a Magic Leap user will be able to interact with intelligent assistants in the form of fully realized augmented reality humans that can recognize your position in a room, as well as items in that room.