In a corner of LG's sprawling, dripping-with-technology booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center sat a circular table populated by a group of small, futuristic snowmen. Each of them sported a black touchscreen display showing a pair of electronic eyes that would intermittently squint as if they were smiling at you. On a large screen nearby, a video showed one of these gizmos, the LG Hub Robot, calling out in a soothing tone: "Hello. I learn your lifestyle to better serve you." This year's CES tech show in Las Vegas highlighted how our technology is finding its voice, with makers of cars, appliances and speakers starting to let people control their products simply by talking to them.

Microsoft is making available to its Windows Insiders testers the first Windows 10 Desktop test build that includes its new'Project Spartan' browser. Today's Windows 10 Desktop preview is the second Microsoft has made available to testers in March, and the fourth Windows 10 Desktop build the company has released as of October 1, 2014. Like Windows 10 Desktop -- which runs on PCs, laptops and tablets -- Spartan is still not feature-complete at this point. The first Spartan preview does, however, include most of the functionality that Microsoft execs showed off on January 21 during an early demo of Spartan as part of a Windows 10 press event. Specifically, the integration between Spartan and Cortana, Microsoft's personal digital assistant, is in today's Windows 10 release, as is the "Ask Cortana" user assistance technology.

Facebook's move to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered personal assistant dubbed M could be a technology step forward. But M is also going to contribute to a personal assistant bandwagon that's going to get crowded. Welcome to the world of personal assistant sprawl. Microsoft, Google and Apple all want their mobile platforms to anticipate your needs, schedule appointments, give you directions and even buy gifts for your sibling. Now Facebook is in the fray.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has often been popularly envisaged in super-smart humanoid robot form. In fact, it's more commonly implemented as behind-the-scenes algorithms that can process'big' data to accomplish a range of relatively mundane tasks far more efficiently than humans can. Few of us, yet, interact with bipedal robots or take a ride in a driverless car, but our daily lives are increasingly affected by AI systems that can recognise speech or images, or analyse patterns of online behaviour (to detect credit card fraud or serve up appropriate adverts, for example). Nor is it any surprise to find AI and automation featuring prominently on analyst firm Gartner's 2015 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, which places autonomous vehicles, for example, right at the hype-driven'Peak of Inflated Expectations': Gartner also identifies'Autonomous' as the sixth and final stage of an organisation's journey to becoming a'digital business', highlighting a range of emerging technologies as particularly relevant: Autonomous Vehicles, Bioacoustic Sensing, Biochips, Brain-Computer Interface, Digital Dexterity, Human Augmentation, Machine Learning, Neurobusiness, People-Literate Technology, Quantum Computing, Smart Advisors, Smart Dust, Smart Robots, Virtual Personal Assistants, Virtual Reality, and Volumetric and Holographic Displays. What follows hype, of course, is disillusionment: this has happened to AI before, and it's unlikely that all of the technologies flagged up in Gartner's Hype Cycle will make it to the mainstream.

Apple has a vision of a future in which the disembodied voice of Siri is your constant companion. It goes something like this: You arrive home at the end of a long day and plop down on the couch. A beer in one hand, your phone in the other, you say, "Siri, open Netflix and play The IT Crowd." Midway through the program, you feel a draft. Siri politely tells you the temperature, and asks if you'd like it raised.

CLT Blog's Justin Ruckman decoded SEC filings to turn up an intriguing recent Amazon acquisition: Yap, a Charlotte-based speech-recognition startup best known for its recently shuttered voicemail transcription app and backend services for some of Microsoft's voice-to-text application. So far, Amazon hasn't publicly commented on or even confirmed Yap's acquisition, and didn't immediately respond to our attempts to find out what it plans to do with the company. It's an uncharacteristic buy for them, since the company traditionally hasn't bothered much with voice technology. Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet doesn't even have a microphone. One enticing but unlikely possibility, dangled by CLT Blog and subsequently picked up by many bigger tech sites, is that Amazon is making a bid to compete with Siri, Apple's brand-new voice-driven interface for iPhone.

LOS ANGELES--Will.i.am sounds congested and subdued, his batteries running low after a high-octane appearance on The Ellen Show earlier that day. He's longing for 2025, when an artificial intelligence will be able to tell him to take it easy. "Will, you sound like you are stuffy," he says in the voice of this fictional AI. "What did you eat recently? Stay away from sweets because they are causing you more mucus. You should get some rest tonight. I'm going to cancel your appointments from 7 pm. I've already bought you some epsom salts from CVS. Go and pick them up."

Wander around WIRED's San Francisco headquarters on any given day and you're likely to encounter quite a zoo: hoverboard-riding video shooters dodging begoggled editors who are testing beta VR hardware; one of our favorite TV makers coming in for a meeting; security writers debating the latest cyberwar skirmish around the corner from a conference call with the founder of the Valley's latest unicorn company; and dogs (10 of them, by my count). But this time of year, the always lively view from my desk takes on an especially electric feel as we train our focus on a new horizon. So to give you a sense of what we're gearing up to cover in 2016, I tapped the hive mind of writers and editors and pulled together a list of the big developments we expect to be following as the year unfolds. There's a lot to look forward to. Politics is all about message control, but Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Vine, et al. have rewritten the messaging playbook.

Social networks teem with harassment and trolling, so much so that companies have outsourced the work of content moderation to an army of laborers, typically overseas, often at an enormous mental and emotional toll to the workers themselves. But what if you didn't need humans to identify when online abuse was happening? If a computer was smart enough to spot cyberbullying as it happened, maybe it could be halted faster, without the emotional and financial costs that come with humans doing the job. At SRI International, the Silicon Valley incubator where Apple's Siri digital assistant was born, researchers believe they've developed algorithms that come close to doing just that. "Social networks are overwhelmed with these kinds of problems, and human curators can't manage the load," says Norman Winarsky, president of SRI Ventures.

I'm fairly new to San Francisco, so I'm still building my mental database of restaurants I like. But this weekend, I know exactly where I'm heading to for dinner: Nick's Crispy Tacos. Then, when I get home, I'm kicking back to a documentary I've never heard of, a Mongolian drama called The Cave of the Yellow Dog. An artificially intelligent algorithm told me I'd enjoy both these things. I'd like the restaurant, the machine told me, because I prefer Mexican food and wine bars "with a casual atmosphere," and the movie because "drama movies are in my digital DNA."