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The machines haven't taken over. However, they are seeping their way into our lives, affecting how we live, work and entertain ourselves. From voice-powered personal assistants like Siri and Alexa, to more underlying and fundamental technologies such as behavioral algorithms, suggestive searches and autonomously-powered self-driving vehicles boasting powerful predictive capabilities, there are several examples and applications of artificial intellgience in use today. However, the technology is still in its infancy. What many companies are calling A.I. today, aren't necessarily so.

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is upon us. As many in the field already know, AI in its various forms and expressions -- neural networks, machine learning, computer vision, and so on -- isn't a new media-fueled fad or trend, but rather the next era of our tech-centric civilization. Simultaneously, there's a revolution happening with the digital habits of consumers, who are increasingly glued to their phones and communicating more and more via visual means (instead of just text) through social media and messaging apps. As a result of these concurrent trends, business and marketing will undergo radical transformations, with AI enabling powerful and useful new methods of connecting consumers directly with companies. Here are just some of these new approaches.

Men and women may prefer female voices for their digital assistants, but it's about time we had more male options

Being able to talk to your inbox via Alexa to access your most important messages may mean you won't be as tied to your smartphone all the time. You use it to talk to everyone else, so why not talk to your inbox itself? Notion got its start as a free app for Android and iOS that syncs with your inbox, then applies some fancy machine learning and artificial intelligence to make it easier to parse through all your content. Now, it's made it easier still to interact with your inbox -- with your voice by way of Alexa. The custom Alexa skill (which means you'll need to start each command with "ask Notion") lets you check for new mail, delete old messages, or even sum up the most important messages you've yet to get to following that well-deserved vacation when you let your inbox go unchecked.

Amazon is bringing its voice assistant to British television screens with the latest edition of its popular Fire TV stick. The £40 ($50) stick that transforms any TV screen into a streaming device will now come with Alexa - the female helper from Amazon Echo. The update will let viewers quickly search for content and rewind programmes using only their voice. Viewers can speak to the bot through an in-built microphone on the device's remote control TV viewers will be able to speak to Alexa through a microphone built into the device's remote control. The bot will be able to understand entertainment-specific commands such as'skip back 10 minutes' and'find suspense thrillers'.

These are just a few data-driven ways to overcome the everyday challenges of practical machine learning. Alyssa Frazee is a machine learning engineer at Stripe, where she builds models to detect fraud in online credit card payments. Before Stripe, she did a PhD in biostatistics and fell in love with programming at the Recurse Center. Find her on Twitter at @acfrazee. Machine learning has long powered many products we interact with daily–from "intelligent" assistants like Apple's Siri and Google Now, to recommendation engines like Amazon's that suggest new products to buy, to the ad ranking systems used by Google and Facebook.

Amazon is bringing the next generation of its excellent Fire TV Stick to the UK, updating the device with Alexa, expanded voice search capabilities and a new user interface. The addition of Alexa support is undoubtedly the most notable upgrade. The artificial intelligence assistant is widely recognised as the best in the game, powering Amazon's Echo speakers, and is set to land on a range of new product categories in the near future, including cars, phones, fridges and TVs. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Where is the data stored and who has access to it? How is my personal data shared? Today many mobile apps are connected to trackers that collect personal information and sell it.

It's the beginning of the end for smartphone apps as we have known and tapped on them, reckons Gartner. The analyst is calling the start of a "post-apps" era, based on changes in consumer interactions that appear driven, in large part, by the rise of dominant messaging platforms designed to consume more and more of mobile users' time and attention. It reckons messaging apps will become more popular than social media apps within the next two years. In a new report, based on a survey of mobile users in the US, China and the UK, Gartner's reading of the app usage tea-leaves shows signs of messaging platforms cannibalizing other apps, with for example, usage of dedicated video apps declining four percentage points between the 2015 and 2016 editions of the survey. Usage of standalone maps apps also shrunk by three percentage points, year-over-year, according to Gartner's data.