The first thing to understand about the next wave of AI assistants, which includes DuerOS, is they will be device agnostic. That is, they will live in the cloud and follow us from device to device, seamlessly syncing across time and space. If this doesn't give you evil nightmares of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, it probably should, because reading lips will likely be just one of the many "superpowers" these AI assistants possess. For anyone with an android smartphone, Google probably already knows more about your recent history than you do! Doubt this, just check out your Google Timeline or Search History for a creepy, dystopian, stroll down memory lane. But the AI assistant to rule them all will be the one best positioned to make sense of these breadcrumbs left behind when we search the internet or enable location tracking on our cell phones, and thereby anticipate our actions and desires.

With Amazon now a major player in the UK grocery market, supermarkets have been forced to adapt or risk losing some of that all important market share. Some have mimicked their rival by offering one-hour deliveries, while others have attempted to match the online retailer's technological prowess. Already a pioneer of grocery-sorting robots and autonomous deliveries, Ocado has stepped things up a notch, today becoming the first UK supermarket to launch a dedicated Amazon Alexa skill. As you'd expect, the Ocado skill focuses mainly on getting the right products in your basket. But be aware: it's currently not capable of starting a new order, it can only add items to an existing one.

While voice assistant systems didn't come online as early as many anticipated, there are a number of options, both widely used and in development, and it's time for businesses to determine is voice assistance is right for their office. While these programs are constantly evolving, they already offer broad capabilities, making it easier to schedule activities, set reminders, and find answers to questions. Microsoft's Cortana is fast making inroads as well, especially since it made its way to PCs, and Amazon's Alexa has outdone expectations for providing home-based voice assistance. While these programs make voice assistance popular among consumers, they haven't made much progress in an office setting. Voice assistance programs are great for organizing your personal life, and they can certainly help for scheduling work-related activities.

NEW YORK – A half-gallon of milk was 50 cents cheaper at a Whole Foods in New York. Ground beef was down by $2 a pound. Amazon kicked off its first day as the owner of Whole Foods by slashing prices, adding its logo on signs and setting up a stand of "farm fresh" Amazon Echo voice-assistant devices by store entrances. It's just the first taste of the moves the e-commerce giant will make at the organic grocer after it completed the $13.7 billion deal on Monday. More changes are coming: The company aims to make Amazon Prime the rewards program at Whole Foods and some Whole Foods products will show up on Amazon's site.

A new feature allows users to ask Amazon's voice assistant Alexa to play "baby making jazz music." FILE - This file photo provided by Amazon shows models of the Amazon Echo Show. With Echo Show, Amazon has given its voice-enabled Echo speaker a touch screen and video-calling capabilities as it competes with Google's efforts at bringing "smarts" to the home. Amazon has been ramping up efforts to get more people to shop using the Alexa voice assistant on Echo speakers and other Amazon devices. NEW YORK -- In the name of convenience, Amazon and Walmart are pushing people to shop by just talking to a digital assistant.

In another sign of changes to come, a display offering Amazon's Echo and smaller Echo Dot hands-free smart speakers for $99.99 and $44.99, respectively, was nestled amid the colorful produce at the Whole Foods in downtown Los Angeles. Those gadgets sell for the same price on Amazon.com.

As artificial intelligence (AI) gains more momentum in the healthcare sector, CIOs' use of these technologies has expanded. And as a result, the industry is now moving quickly, crafting solutions to meet this growing demand. To this point, according to the findings of a recent Accenture report based on C-suite executive responses from more than 100 health organizations, AI is poised to become the new user interface (UI) in health IT. The report noted, "The growing role of AI in healthcare is moving beyond a back-end tool to the forefront of the consumer and clinician experience, becoming a new user interface that underpins the ways individuals transact and interact with systems. Emphasizing its growing importance of AI, more than four-fifths (84 percent) of healthcare executives surveyed as part of the research believe that AI will revolutionize the way they gain information from and interact with consumers, and nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of health organizations surveyed are already using virtual assistants to create better customer interactions."

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. Until recently, the most affordable home assistant worth buying was Amazon's Echo Dot smart speaker. But Anker, the makers of the best-selling Eufy RoboVac 11, recently released a comparable device called the Eufy Genie that comes with a much lower price tag. This little device typically sells for $35, a full $15 less than the Dot, but right now it's on sale for $29.70 (15% off).

Amazon isn't wasting any time now that its Whole Foods acquisition has gone through. Sure enough, visitors to Whole Foods stores have noticed that the grocery stores are already pitching discounted Echo speakers ($100 for the regular model, and $45 for the Dot) at very prominent stands. They're "farm fresh," according to the displays -- as if you'd find them growing in a field next to the carrots. It's a pretty shameless plug, although one you could have seen coming. Amazon craves retail space, and Whole Foods' abundance of stores (470 across North America and the UK) gives it plenty of opportunities to hawk its hardware.

This story was originally published by Data-Smart City Solutions. It was excerpted from a paper "Artificial Intelligence for Citizen Services and Government" written by Harvard Ash Center Technology and Democracy Fellow Hila Mehr. From online services like Netflix and Facebook, to chatbots on our phones and in our homes like Siri and Alexa, we are beginning to interact with artificial intelligence (AI) on a near daily basis. AI is the programming or training of a computer to do tasks typically reserved for human intelligence, whether it is recommending which movie to watch next or answering technical questions. From small cities in the US to countries like Japan, government agencies are looking to AI to improve citizen services.