"Siri, how many tablespoons are in a cup?" You probably use digital assistants to help you cook dinner at night and plan your clothes for the next day. But are you taking advantage of the same technology to get more done during your work day? And do you know the etiquette of working with digital assistants? We asked Robby Slaughter, productivity expert and principal at AccelaWork, a business consulting firm, what we all need to know about using digital assistants to get more done at work.

Amazon's Alexa is becoming less hospitable to people who prefer to buy music instead of just signing up for a music subscription service such as Spotify. Until recently, Amazon Music Storage was the best way to stream your personal music collection onto Alexa devices--provided it was encoded as MP3 files. But in December, Amazon stopped supporting new uploads for the free service; it stopped accepting paid subscriptions a month later. In January 2019, Amazon will shut down Music Storage entirely, rendering your MP3 collection inaccessible on Echo devices unless you purchased the songs directly through Amazon's digital store. To play your own MP3s (or music encoded in other formats, such as FLAC) on the Echo or other Alexa devices, you can still use Plex or My Media Server for Alexa, both of which allow you to stream songs that you've stored on another device.

Today, we are living in a smart digital era where technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality promise to disrupt our lives for better. Our homes are now equipped with intelligent virtual assistants like Alexa, and very soon there will be a plethora of smart home appliances and connected devices that can be controlled with simple voice commands or through mobile apps. Today, we are living in a smart digital era where technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality promise to disrupt our lives for better. Our homes are now equipped with intelligent virtual assistants like Alexa, and very soon there will be a plethora of smart home appliances and connected devices that can be controlled via simple voice commands or mobile apps. Our cities have become smarter and safer too.

Robo advisors, a class of financial advisor that provide financial advice or investment management online with moderate to minimal human intervention, are growing in popularity. These provide digital financial advice based on mathematical rules or algorithms to automatically allocate, manage and optimize clients' assets. This allows these companies to provide more affordable and accessible services. Unlike conventional asset management services which require large amounts of investment capital, digital asset management services can be obtained starting with much lower investment capital, sometimes only a few hundred bucks, other times, a few thousands. The robo advisor develops a personalized portfolio for clients and then monitors it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Amazon has a new way to reel you into Audible now that smart speakers are a big deal: give you a freebie just by asking. As of this week, anyone who's new to Audible can ask an Echo speaker to read a full audiobook at no cost. You don't have to be picky about your choice of book, either, so you can ask for the hot new novel if that's your preference. Naturally, Amazon is hoping you'll be so enamored that you sign up on the spot -- if you aren't, though, you can at least say that it didn't take much effort to get that free book in the first place.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning permeated HIMSS18 such that the dynamic duo was just about everywhere in Las Vegas last week. From expected experts such as long-time Google executive Eric Schmidt to surprise speakers, notably White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner, discussing it on stage, the promise was palpable, the use cases more numerous than ever before. Add EHR vendors to that roster. Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks and Epic revealed big plans for adding AI into the workflow in forthcoming iterations of their electronic health records platforms. Anyone who hoofed it over to Microsoft's booth may have encountered a rendering of something at least conceptually similar in the form of a Surface monitor displaying Epic's EHR and AI running in conjunction with Microsoft's Azure.

A common problem for any scaling business is bringing on the right help at the right time. Small-business owners often find that the people they can afford don't have the skills or experience to do the job well, and the people they want cost too much relative to the business's current cash flow. Most of the work is labor intensive, repetitive, boring and must be done correctly. As luck would have it, that's exactly the kind of tasks we build computers to do. In the past 15 or so years, outsourcing to international assistants and part-time workers has been the go-to solution for entrepreneurs looking to grow on a budget.

In its relatively short existence, online dating has gone from being a highly stigmatized way to meet people to the default strategy for locating dates among younger, and even older, generations. Older models based on sites like eHarmony have given way to gamified systems like Tinder and its contemporaries, but the equation has remained mostly unchanged. Users create profiles intended to exhibit the best possible impression (sometimes to the point of exaggeration or lying) before other users make selections based on limited information if they are interested. The industry is undoubtedly in a boom after millions of new users flocked to join online dating services in recent years, but it is not without its headwinds. Most of the existing apps, including major names like Tinder and Bumble, create little incentive for honesty, rewarding those whose profile looks best, and not the most transparent.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels told Axios in an interview that Alexa "will greatly improve by being exposed to different kinds of statements or conversations." This is because we have different kinds of conversations at work than we do at home. Exposing Alexa to this new type of environment will broaden the virtual assistant's skills and responses. The company has already gotten started on Alexa for Business. Challenges include finding a way for Alexa to integrate with enterprise software, as well as providing a framework for businesses to write custom skills for the voice assistant.

This is the year every voice assistant adds native iPad support, it seems. Hot on the heels of Microsoft's Cortana update, Google has released an iPad-friendly version of Assistant. The updated app takes full advantage of the tablet's larger screen, of course, but that also includes multitasking support in iOS 11 -- you can send commands to the AI companion while you're chatting with a friend or planning your day. The app is available now in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portugese and Spanish.