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).

There are few electronic devices with which you cannot order a Domino's pizza. When the craving hits, you can place an order via Twitter, Slack, Facebook Messenger, SMS, your tablet, your smartwatch, your smart TV, and even your app-enabled Ford. This year, the pizza monger added another ordering tool: If your home is one of the 20 million with a voice assistant, you can place a regular order through Alexa or Google Home. Just ask for a large extra-cheese within earshot, and voila--your pizza is in the works. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Many in Russia, in fact, seem to prefer their AI helpers with sass and a dark sense of humor. The Moscow-based tech giant Yandex launched a Russian-speaking personal assistant called Alice this October (pictured above, sans snark). And unlike Siri or Alexa, the program relies less on scripted responses than on what it's learned by consuming conversational data mined from the Web, news articles, and even a little Russian literature. As a result, Alice can respond to a much wider range of queries. However, some of program's responses can be a bit surprising.

His artificially intelligent assistant greets him of the key news items, events of the day, priority messages, meetings, and urgent action items. My important items are addressed through a natural language interface while I get ready for work and prepare for my hour long commute. Upon entering my self driving car, I Initiate a 6G video call through a hologram projected on the dashboard. Via HD virtual reality I engage in a discussion re out upcoming sales conference. My virtual assistant records notes and key action from the meeting, presenting the team with a summary and recording next steps in our meetingspace for later review.

In the business intelligence (BI) world, more and more companies are talking about machine learning (ML) being leveraged in their software. However, try to talk to them about it and there is silence. Infrastructure vendors, IBM, NVIDIA, Intel, Oracle (remember, that's where Sun went), Qualcomm and more are talking up their chips for ML. Again, try to talk with them about a real business case study, a customer who has implemented a system, and, if you get back anything, you get back anonymous companies described in a paragraph or even just a sentence. On the other hand, the success of Apple Siri and Amazon Echo, the continued growth of Microsoft Cortana Echo, and the entrance of Google Now show that voice recognition is rapidly becoming mainstream in the consumer world.

In Estonia, where the digital state was invented, the government is hard at work on the legal status of robots. The question is: do artificial intelligences deserve "human" rights? This may seem like a particularly lame way for EU bureaucrats to kill some time and spend taxpayer cash, slightly ahead of counting angels on pins, and just behind dictating rules around who can make cheese, or what wines qualify as "Burgundy." Because in a time when AI is advancing and commerce will move largely to AI-driven voice-powered systems, you will soon be in command of intelligent systems. You'll be able to request that systems buy things, reserve tickets, and purchase commodities for you.