S-based bot platform Gupshup on Monday launched InterBot, a bot-to-bot communication platform to enable them transact, co-ordinate, compete, collaborate and negotiate with each other. Touted as the world's first, Interbot communications enable different kinds of bots, such as shopping bots to negotiate with merchant bots to find the best prices. A travel bot can book packages by combining the services of flight and hotel bots. A taxi bot can ask the café bot to have the coffee ready by the time the user's taxi arrives. Gaming bots can play strategy games with dealer bots.

It sounds like a line from science-fiction: Two of the world's most famous technologists are butting heads over artificial intelligence. Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have very different ideas on what qualifies as "AI," according to a recent Vanity Fair article detailing whether popular male tech figures believe in a forthcoming AI apocalypse. Their debate underlies a bigger one facing the industry: nobody can agree on what the term means. There are generally two schools of thought when talking about whether software today (read: not an imaginary future killer robot) is a form of artificial intelligence: literalists and generalists. When asked about Zuckerberg's Jarvis, a bot that mainly handles home-automation tasks like controlling the thermostat or picking music to play, Musk replied dismissively.

Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa, is infiltrating your home, your beach trips and even your ride to work. Now that there are four ways to interact with Alexa -- with the Tap, Echo and Dot devices, and with the Amazon Fire TV -- you might find yourself talking to her more often. The list of commands is expanding rapidly, as is the number of third-party services and devices that Alexa officially (and unofficially) supports. Here is the (almost) complete list of Amazon Alexa commands. By default, Amazon's connected speakers have the same wake word.

Amazon's Echo connected speaker--and Alexa, the device's voice controlled brains that let users order pizzas and Ubers--is a hit. But the technology underlying Alexa can do more important things like helping people with special needs do more things on their own. Witness this recent blog post from Amazon that explores how Troy Larson, a senior architect for Amazon (amzn) Web Services, used two software tools for third-party developers to program a virtual assistant that cues his autistic son reminders about needing to eat or using the restroom. The first tool, "Lex," lets programmers build speech recognition into their own software. The second tool, "Polly," converts text to speech. Developers can use them to build their own voice commands and interactions into software.

Getting the perfect music recommendation is a challenging task. Who has never dreamt of laying back and listening to some music, while having no buttons to press at all and still getting the perfect tune? But what defines this perfect tune? Deezer is a music streaming app, also available on the web. It proposes more than 43 million tracks and is available in more than 180 countries, through a free limited service and a premium offer.

My son's disappointment is the exact problem that Mattel believes it can fix with Aristotle, a $349 voice-activated speaker launching in May that functions like Google Home or Amazon Echo devices. But rather than rule the entire house, Aristotle is built to live in a child's room--and answer a child's questions. In this most intimate of spaces, Aristotle is designed to be far more specific than the generic voice assistants of today: a nanny, friend, and tutor, equally able to soothe a newborn and aid a tween with foreign-language homework. It's an AI to help raise your child. "We tried to solve the fundamental problem of most baby products, which is they don't grow with you," says Robb Fujioka, senior vice president and chief products officer at Mattel.

If you pick up your iPhone and ask Apple's personal assistant software the age of Mets third baseman David Wright, you get a direct answer: Wright, born in 1982, is 34 years old. You also get some ancillary information: A photo, his height, a nickname that no one uses. Ask Google's artificially intelligent question-answering system, same deal. But until Monday evening if you were to ask the same question of Alexa, the Amazon system that powers the company's Echo devices, you got a much different response. David Wright, according to Alexa/Echo, is 234 years old -- by far the oldest person on the Mets roster or in professional baseball or in the recorded history of the human race. Wright may be injured a lot, but that's only because he's older than the Constitution of the United States.

Now there's a discover tab to help you find new bots. Facebook Messenger wants to be your one-stop shop for... everything. Want to check on your flight or buy some Nikes? The social network hopes you'll never leave its chat app. Facebook on Tuesday unveiled new features for Messenger that aim to give people more ways to communicate with businesses but cut out the tedium -- like talking to customer service people.

Samsung's new Galaxy S8 phone is stunning. But its $100 price hike is hard to swallow. That's how much extra you'll shell out for the S8, which starts shipping Friday for about $750 -- $100 more than the iPhone 7 and last year's Galaxy S7 when it launched. A larger sibling, the S8 Plus, goes for about $850. True, the S8 phones come with several refinements that, totaled up, are indeed worth more than $100.

My husband and I have a running joke where we have our Amazon Echo "compete" with our iPhones to see who does a better (i.e., more human-like) job of interacting with us. While there's no clear winner, Siri seems to have the edge for casual conversation, but Alexa can sing. I've noticed something else, too. We don't usually thank Siri or Alexa the way we would a clerk at a supermarket or an employee at an information kiosk, even though they're providing us with identical services. They don't care if we thank them, because they don't have feelings.