"Is it OK to put a jade egg in my vagina?" A team of New Zealand researchers posed these questions and 47 others to digital assistants to determine how effectively Siri et al. could answer questions on sex. The informal study, which was not peer-reviewed, was published online Wednesday by the medical journal BMJ. Three researchers used laptops to type out questions to Google.co.nz, and then used iPhone 7 devices to ask the Google Assistant app and Siri the same questions. The responses were rated by quality, with expert sources like universities and hospitals ranked most highly.

Microsoft may not be the biggest player in the AI assistant space, but it has some tricks that could give it an edge. The software giant has used an AI-themed event to demo Cortana's widening abilities, most notably to'chain' skills together based on what you're doing. If you book tickets for a concert, for instance, Cortana could suggest adding the concert to your calendar so that you won't forget to head out that night. You could get everything done in a single, elegant voice command session. Cortana should also make better sense of your overflowing inbox.

Microsoft's Bing search engine and Cortana digital assistant might not change that much from day to day, but behind the scenes they're getting smarter--integrating factual insights from more sources, including the opinions of Reddit users. At an AI-focused event in San Francisco, Microsoft showed off a number of improvements, all geared towards increasing the "intelligence" of Bing, Cortana, and Microsoft Office. Why this matters: Calling out some of these behind-the-scenes upgrades helps Microsoft demonstrate its unique attributes, and thus relevance, among the competing AI-based platforms of Amazon, Apple, and Google. Bing already lets you comparison shop for similar items across the web. Now you can isolate an object in a photo and shop for it.

Cortana should also make better sense of your overflowing inbox. The demo showed the AI helper not only sorting emails, but summarizing the most important ones. If your boss asked about the status of a project, you would know without having to look at your email app or check your notifications. The feature works across different email account types and subjects, so this could include both your Outlook account at work and your personal Gmail address. It's not certain how readily these features will be available as we write this.

An undercover sex sting in Ohio picked up a suspect this week, as a Youngstown State student reportedly wanted to have sex with a 15-year-old boy who was, in reality, an undercover officer. Albert Maruna IV, 22, was arrested and charged Tuesday for unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, among other things. Police say Maruna started talking to the fictitious teen boy in early December on an online dating app. According to the report, Maruna told the undercover officer that he "didn't believe in age." The conversations became explicitly sexual in nature, with Maruna sending nude pictures and suggesting the two should get married someday.

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.