Matrix Labs has been hard at work creating a special AI voice recognition system for the Raspberry Pi, and now it seems to have come to fruition. After running a successful crowdfunding campaign to fund the project, we've gotten a look at the "Voice," which aims to have you creating your very own personal assistant a la Alexa and company. This could very well be the start of your own creations. The Voice, which was created by Rodolfo Saccoman and Brian Sanchez, will include an "open-source voice recognition platform" made up of 3.14 inch in diameter dev board with a radial array of 7 MEMS microphones connected to a Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA & 64 Mbit SDRAM with 18 RGBW LED's & 64 GPIO pins. In other words, it's a pretty powerful little device, and you can add lights into the mix with whatever voice recognition you set up.

If you haven't tried Cortana on the Xbox One, Microsoft would like you take another look. As part of the Xbox One Creators Update, Microsoft's virtual assistant has received an upgrade, supporting some new tricks such as reminders and alarms. Still, some Cortana voice commands are more useful than others on the Xbox One. And if you're coming from a Windows 10 PC, be aware that some commands haven't made their way to the console. Below is a list of the Xbox One's more useful voice commands for Cortana.

A quarter of voice technology users say they've had a sexual fantasy about their voice assistant, a new study has revealed. Even more users, 37 per cent, say that they love their voice assistant so much that they wish it were a real person. The findings could have an impact on how brands such as Google and Amazon design their voice technologies for human interaction. Pictured is Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix in the movie Her. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has recently cited two studies that investigate these allegations, which have discovered that'both women and men find the female voice welcoming and warm,' reports Joanna Stern with WSJ.

Viv is the next-generation virtual personal assistant, brought to you by the team that created Siri. Viv will provide a truly open platform that lets any developer extend Viv's knowledge and capabilities. VentureBeat named Viv one of the top 15 interesting startups to watch in 2016, and after our acquisition by Samsung, Viv is now poised to bring our vision of a new kind of user interaction to the world at global scale. Check out this demo from TechCrunch Disrupt NY, and watch the power of Viv in action! In this role, you will directly contribute to the Viv Assistant's Natural Language Understanding platform.

Earlier today Facebook launched their new M assistant service in Messenger on iOS and Android for the US (with other countries to come). Much like Google Assistant in Allo it's meant to drop in at convenient points in a conversation to give you shortcuts and tools to simplify things. Facebook announced M well over a year ago, jumping a bit late on the bandwagon of personal assistants, but allegedly theirs is at least partially driven or overseen by real living human beings, which sets it apart from the others in no small way. If they manage to leverage enough other modern tech buzzwords like AI, machine learning, and perhaps some synergy for flavor, it may even be of some use. In any event, we knew it was being added to Messenger, and it's finally here.

Facebook has launched its digital assistant named'M' for US users of its Messenger application, ramping up the social network's efforts in artificial intelligence. For users of the messaging platform, M will pop up and suggest'helpful actions' in the chat window. The move is seen as the first step in a broader launch of the digital assistant to compete against services from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Samsung, which is launching its new assistant with its newest smartphone. Facebook has launched its digital assistant named'M' for US users of its Messenger application, ramping up the social network's efforts in artificial intelligence. M will pop up and suggest'helpful actions' in the chat window - such as getting you rides or sharing stickers M is capable of recognizing intent in a conversation, which allows it to perform a range of different tasks.

Stateside, Facebook Messenger users can now expect a little help from M, the AI-powered virtual assistant that Facebook has been developing for more than a year. M will make its presence known to Messenger users by popping right into their active conversations and suggesting what it considers to be relevant content and actions. Among a small percentage of users, Facebook says it has been testing such suggestions for the past few month and deems it a "great success," Laurent Landowski and Kemal El Moujahid, both product managers at Facebook, note in a new blog post. When M recognizes intent in a user's conversation, it may suggest a relevant sticker to share with friends and family. If it recognizes when people are discussing payments, M might offer gives them the option of sending or requesting money.

And, if the recently launched M suggestions is any indication, the coders at the social media giant look back on the panic-inducing anthropomorphized paperclip with a bizarre degree of fondness. SEE ALSO: Facebook's new emoji are finally available to everyone "M is your helpful assistant in Messenger, powered by artificial intelligence," reads an April 6 Facebook press release. "M offers suggestions by popping into an open conversation to suggest relevant content and capabilities to enrich the way people communicate and get things done." Basically, Facebook is stoked to yank intrusive helper-popups from the dustbin of history and plop them right onto your smartphone. The company has been testing M for some time, but today marks the release of the suggestions feature to all U.S. users of Messenger -- Facebook's chat app.

This shot shows M suggesting stickers to add into a conversation. SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook's artificial intelligence assistant, M, will now pop into chats on Messenger to offer suggestions for stickers, payments, rides or to help coordinate a meeting time. Beginning Thursday, M will chime in when Facebook users are chatting via Messenger, to suggest "relevant content and capabilities" says Facebook. The long-delayed service launched as a beta test in December and was rolled out to all iOS and Android Facebook Messenger users in the United States on Thursday as part of an update to the app. M uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to get better at suggesting relevant actions during conversations.

More than a year after introducing a virtual assistant in its Messenger app, Facebook is launching M to the masses. While it was originally conceived as a bot that users would chat with, M now only offers a set of suggestions that are supposed to help with the conversation being carried out. For example, when users are chatting about getting together for dinner, M will suggest that they create a shared plan that will remind them of the engagement as it approaches. The assistant will give them suggested stickers to react to conversational turns, along with prompts to transfer money, share location, start a poll, or get a ride from Uber or Lyft. M uses machine learning to figure out when it should jump into a conversation by reading the chats between users.