In its early days, the television was a wood-enclosed box that blended in with your existing living room furniture. Its screen was small; plastics and composites weren't yet commonplace. Over time, manufacturing abilities, design trends, and television usage changed. The TV became the focal point of the living room--and it didn't need to blend in anymore. The device lost its homely trappings and evolved into the giant, black, personality-less screen we know today.

AirPlay 2 has arrived on Sonos. From today, any app on your iOS devices can be streamed directly to Sonos speakers including Sonos Beam, Sonos One, Playbase and the second generation Play:5. Plus, Siri is on board with an extensive set of voice controls. Not only can you ask Siri to play songs on Apple Music, you can also specify which room or devices you want them to play on. The roll out comes a week ahead of the new Beam living room smart speaker, which ships with AirPlay 2 support as standard.

Wolfe Herd's app has expanded beyond dating, with features promoting female friendship and career networking.Jamel Toppin/Forbes Some users of Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd's dating app, are lucky enough to swipe right and find love, a new friend or a job opportunity. Wolfe Herd, though, may be the luckiest of all: The app, which Forbes values at $1 billion, has brought its 29-year-old founder a $230 million fortune. While Wolfe Herd missed the cut for this year's Forbes list of America's Richest Self-Made Women, Forbes predicts it won't be too long before she joins the ranks, assuming Bumble keeps growing at the rate it has. Bumble's biggest competitor is Tinder, founded in 2012 as one of the first "swiping" dating apps,using a customer's location to find matches. Wolfe Herd actually helped build what is now her adversary.

There is a pending boom of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and organizations will capitalize on them as AI continues to scale, evolve and mature. Over time, AI adoption at the enterprise level will cause an incremental upending of the traditionally known roles, skills and talent composition within every single business function. According to the 2018 Human Capital Trends Report, "The transition to digital business tools is at the top of the strategic agenda for many businesses today." If mobile, social and cloud computing were some of the biggest platform shifts and technological investments that dominated the beginning of the 21st century, AI investments will be considered the next wave of major technological shifts. Forrester predicts that most (if not all) technology functions will be augmented or replaced by AI.

Amazon's Alexa two-way voice technology has been embedded in clock radios, thermostats, televisions, and even lamps. With the Ecobee Switch, it now comes to the humble light switch. There are dozens of those. This is a switch with a legit Alexa hub built into it, blue light and everything. Speak into the embedded microphone, and your light switch can do just about anything that your standalone Echo device can do.

Being a child of the 1960s, I was enamored of Star Trek. Among the many future wonders to behold? Computers that could conduct an informed conversation with humans. Fast forward to the present day, and we're getting accustomed to intelligent assistants in our homes and on our phones. Better yet, intelligent assistants are now poised to show their value in the workplace.

Of the many hot topics at the moment, anything related to artificial intelligence is obviously right up there. Like the holy grail, AI has always been just beyond our reach. But technology is rapidly approaching the threshold beyond which it becomes easy to confuse artificial logic with human intelligence. This leads to ethical discussions about human rights for digital beings, but comes no closer to actually defining these digital beings. The Saudi Arabian government's statement about giving a bot named Sophia human rights, is perhaps one of the most significant statements on this issue.

Apple Inc. is handing oversight of its Siri team to new artificial-intelligence chief John Giannandrea three months after hiring him from rival Google, shifting responsibility for the voice-assistant technology to its third leader in the past year. Apple announced Mr. Giannandrea's hiring internally in early April but hadn't publicly laid out his responsibilities until Tuesday, when it added him to the corporate leadership page of its website. It said he will report directly to Chief Executive Tim Cook, with the title chief of machine learning and AI strategy and a purview that includes development of Siri technologies.

Apple has put John Giannandrea exactly where he belongs where his first task will be to fix the schizophrenia that plagues Siri that has done nothing but harm to the appeal of Apple's digital assistant. John Giannandrea is a Scottish computer scientist who most recently led Google's Search and AI activities before being poached by Apple to fix its flagging AI efforts. So far, excellence in AI has not been determined by how many clever people one employs but how by long one has been crunching the data. Therefore, anyone who expects Siri to suddenly earn a PhD overnight is going to be sorely disappointed. Improving Apple's AI is going to be a slow, time-consuming process particularly because its focus on privacy has hobbled its ability to use data to train algorithms.

Branding is a vital part of any company's marketing strategy. Until recently, visual presence has been one of the largest, if not the largest, factors in a company's brand -- but Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants are drastically changing the ways consumers encounter products. Graeme Pitkethly, chief financial officer of Unilever (owner of such brands as Dove, Lipton, and Axe) recently told the Wall Street Journal, "Of all the disruptions that are taking place in all the things technology is bringing into our space, voice is among the most disruptive." Companies spend big money on buying up shelf space in the stores of leading retailers, to ensure their products are at the forefront of a consumer's shopping experience. Yet increasingly, customers are no longer putting themselves in front of physical products before purchasing them.