GE Appliances announced a deal with Google Wednesday enabling the US tech giant's voice control home hub to be used for cooking, cleaning and other functions. The deal enables GE's "Geneva" to communicate with the Google Assistant, so users can say: "Ok Google, ask Geneva Home to set the oven timer for 10 minutes." The announcement comes nearly a year after GE Appliances unveiled a similar tie-up with Amazon's Alexa-powered speakers. It also comes as Google was expected to unveil more partnerships and initiatives in artificial intelligence at its developers conference in California. "Everyone's busy these days and our consumers are looking for simpler and more convenient ways to control their home, especially when busy in the kitchen or working around the house," said Liz VerSchure, vice president at GE Appliances, a unit of the Chinese electronics group Haier.

Voice agents such as Siri and Alexa are all the rage, but they are ultimately limited in what they can do and are a long way from having a real human assistant. At least for the next few years, artificial intelligence will need a helping hand from human intelligence to handle more complex tasks. Unfortunately, human assistance is a luxury that's often unattainable for those running a lean organization. A service called Magic seeks to bridge the gap. Magic is an on-demand personal assistant that you access via text messages.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that there are now 2 billion active devices based on the company's Android software and touted the company's new AI efforts as he took the stage at Google's annual developer conference on Wednesday. He also announced a new product called Google Lens, which will be part of the Google Assistant for Android phones. Lens can identify objects in the real world for a variety of uses. "It's been a very busy year since last year. We've been focused on our core mission of organizing the world's information," he said.

Google is remaking itself as an AI company, a virtual assistant company, a classroom-tools company, a VR company, and a gadget maker, but it's still primarily a search company. And today at Google I/O, its annual gathering of developers, CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new product called Google Lens that amounts to an entirely new way of searching the internet: through your camera. Lens is essentially image search in reverse: you take a picture, Google figures out what's in it. This AI-powered computer vision has been around for some time, but Lens takes it much further. If you take a photo of a restaurant, Lens can do more than just say "it's a restaurant," which you know, or "it's called Golden Corral," which you also know.

You can control this robot vacuum from Alexa or Google Home, and it's on sale right now! (Photo: Neato) If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from any business incentives. Doing chores is actually fun when you can order a machine to do them for you. Right now, you can get a great robot vacuum at a great price and give automated cleaning a try. Amazon's not only selling the Neato Botvac D3 Connected for $349.99 ($50 off the regular price), but there's a $20 coupon that knocks the price down to $329.99.

Imagine if Siri wasn't just an anonymous voice living inside your iPhone. Instead, what if the dulcet tones of none other than Jeff Goldblum asked "how can I help you?" every time you accidentally press your home button for too long? If Steve Jobs had his way, we'd be living in a world where we'd have the chance to carry around our own little piece of Goldblum in our pockets, everywhere we go. Just imagine if you could hear this all day, whenever you ask your AI assistant for some help. "Steve Jobs called me up a few decades ago to be the voice of Apple," the actor told Richard Wilkins of Australia's Today Show in an interview that was picked up by cNet.

Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant, has more than 12,000 skills available, and in the coming weeks some of them will be able to send notifications to your Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices. To start, just four skills will have notifications available including AccuWeather, JustEat, Life360, and The Washington Post. Shopping updates from Amazon's storefront are also coming presumably for item price tracking and the like. Amazon didn't say when notifications would go live for users other than it will happen "soon." These notifications won't work the same as they do on your phone, where every app immediately wants to start buzzing.

Google is expected to reveal its future plans for its Google Home smart speaker and Android operating system on Wednesday. The technology giant is holding its annual I/O developer conference, where the company shares early news on how its various software will change in the coming year. The Google Home smart speaker, launched in the UK earlier this year, as well as Google Assistant, the company's artificial intelligence software, are expected to feature heavily. Google Home and Amazon's Echo have taken the lead in the smart speaker market since late 2016. However Microsoft has already announced plans to launch its own smart speakers using its virtual assistant Cortana, and rumours claim Apple may follow this year too.

If Amazon's upgraded Fire tablet range has left your slate looking a little dated, we have some good news: Alexa is coming. The online retail giant confirmed today that when its new Alexa-equipped Fire 7 and Fire HD 8 tablets arrive early next month, it will push an update to older devices, allowing you to get to grips with the fully-integrated AI assistant. The launch has been a long time coming, especially as US customers have been able to launch apps, play media and listen to news via Alexa since September last year. Amazon says the rollout will begin "in the coming weeks" and that it will continue to update the assistant, meaning it will get smarter over time. Once the update is installed, all you need to do is long-press the home button to activate Alexa.

Major technology companies and new startups are at war over having the most valuable artificial intelligence and at the core of this war is having unique high quality visual data. This battle will be won by owning the connected camera. The majority of the data our brains analyze is visual, and therefore the majority of the data needed for artificial intelligence to have human (or better than human) skills, will rely on the ability for computers to translate high quality visual data. One of the business sectors that will be revolutionized by artificial intelligence is e-commerce. The Amazon's Echo Look is a smart stake in the ground for Amazon.