By now, we've become accustomed to smart speakers shaped vaguely like cans. The original Google Home, the upcoming Apple HomePod, the Amazon Echo and Echo Plus, the UE Blast, the Harmon Kardon Invoke, and a whole pile of others all opt for life as a cylinder. The Google Home Max, however, looks like a traditional speaker, and that leaves lots of room inside for sonic power. The $400 Google Home Max does everything you'd expect a typical Google Home device to do, like tell you the weather, play trivia games, control smart home devices, and of course, sync up to music services like Spotify and Pandora. The Max is roughly the size of a large bread--not the wimpy Wonder Bread from the super market, but a hearty loaf from the farmer's market.

It was a few weeks before Christmas and time to put my voice assistant to the test: Could I just shout out the gifts I needed to buy without having to get on a smartphone or computer? Alexa, the virtual assistant inside my Echo Dot, is really good at reordering stuff I already bought on Amazon. But asking it to order new items was trickier: I had to be precise and know exactly what I wanted to buy. A test by an AP reporter finds that the virtual assistant Alexa inside the Echo Dot is good at reordering stuff bought previously on Amazon. But asking it to order new items was trickier, and it's definitely not for browsing.

Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. Amazon has a discount of $20 active right now on their all new Echo smart speaker, which features a new speaker, new design, and is available in a range of styles including fabrics and wood veneers. Echo connects to Alexa to play music, make calls, set alarms and timers, ask questions, control smart home devices, and more -- instantly. Echo averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 2,200 reviewers, and with the current discount you can grab it for yourself (or someone else) now for just $79.99.

Google Assistant has been available on recent Android phones for a while. However, that still puts it out out of reach of many Android users when a whopping 46.5 percent of active Android users are running a version older than Marshmallow. To help address this, Google is making Assistant available on devices running Android Lollipop. If you're still rocking an older phone, you'll get the same AI helper as a shiny new handset. The update is starting to reach phones with English language settings in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, India and Singapore. It'll also be available in Spanish in the US, Mexico and Spain, and will hit devices in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea.

We have had many previous hype cycles around AI. As I wrote in Silicon Collar: "Since the 1950s! That is when Alan Turing defined his famous test to measure a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to that of a human. In 1959, we got excited when Allen Newell and his colleagues coded the General Problem Solver. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick sent our minds into overdrive with HAL in his movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. We applauded when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat Grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997. We were impressed in 2011 when IBM's Watson beat human champions at Jeopardy! and again in 2016 when Google's AlphaGo showed it had mastered Go, the ancient board game. Currently, we are so excited about Amazon's Echo digital assistant/home automation hub and its ability to recognize the human voice, that we are saying a machine has finally passed the Turing Test. The good news is over the seven decades, the AI community has gifted us a wide range of big words like deep learning, neural networks, cognitive computing and natural language processing. Yale computer science professor David Gelernter thinks we have only scratched the surface. In his book The Tides of Mind, he calls it "the spectrum of consciousness," which is "essentially a range of mental states through which all humans cycle each day.

Amazon Alexa has never sounded or looked better. NEW YORK – It was a few weeks before Christmas and time to put my voice assistant to the test: Could I just shout out the gifts I needed to buy without having to get on a smartphone or computer? Alexa, the virtual assistant inside my Echo Dot from Amazon, is really good at reordering stuff I already bought on the online shopping site. But asking it to order new items was trickier: I had to be precise and know exactly what I wanted to buy. There were times I had to rephrase orders until it could understand me.

Amazon brought multiroom audio support to its Echo speakers a few months ago, but let's face it: unless you're a big fan of Amazon Music Unlimited, it hasn't been very useful for on-demand streaming. As promised, Amazon has added multiroom support for Spotify (oh, and SiriusXM) to let you play the tunes of your choice across more than one Echo at a time, including groups. You won't have to stop listening to an album just because you've moved from the living room to the kitchen. Multi-speaker Spotify streaming is only available in a handful of countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Germany. SiriusXM, unsurprisingly, only gets this option in the US.

For many years, the American public thought of artificial intelligence, or AI, as some big, incredibly complex computer program that would one day achieve sentience and turn on humanity like a James Cameron conceived summer blockbuster. While movie franchises starring angry AI creations turning on their creators continue to do well at the box office, artificial intelligence has made its way into the modern American household. From algorithms on Amazon that suggest what we might want to read next to Siri and Alexa answering our questions to cars that understand traffic patterns and very soon might be driving us to work, artificial intelligence is rapidly disrupting industries. While there has been a great fear for a number of years that robots will replace workers across industries, this has largely not been born out. While robots powered by AI can often replace workers at some of the most menial, automated tasks in a factory, workers are often needed in more specialized capacities to repair, maintain, and respond to alarms that these robotic workers generate.

A virtual assistant, Alisa, is throwing its name in the hat to run against incumbent Vladmir Putin in the 2018 Russian presidential elections. First, let's just dismiss this idea as stupid. Okay, now let's give it a second look – because it actually makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's time to, academically at least, consider alternative political systems based on more logical and rational thought processes – like one that could elect Russia's Alisa. So far, the virtual assistant has over 80,000 "votes" from citizens requesting a place for it on the ballot next year.

If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. There are gifts that are practical, gifts that are functional, and then there are gifts that are just… wowsers, that's beautiful. If you're looking to impress someone with a show-stopping present, this list of gadgets has been imbued with great design, and they're all really useful to boot. Good news: Beautiful does not always mean budget-breaking (though there are a few splurge-worthy items here too).