NEW YORK -- This year you can purchase a bit more of the sci-fi future. Hoverboards aren't quite what the name implies, but there's bona fide virtual reality, a droid you should be looking for and a basketball that improves your free throw, all one shopping-click away. These tech gadgets make the pocket-sized computer that talks to you and dials your friends seem quaint. But don't worry, there are plenty of smartphones on sale, too. Sphero's new $150 BB-8 droid is expected to be one of the hottest Star Wars gifts this holiday season.

We've already told you about the Amazon Echo's smart home chops, but Jeff Bezos' digital assistant is about to get some competition from a small company called Ivee. The company has taken to Indiegogo with its own digital assistant, called Ivee Voice. Like the Echo, Ivee Voice will give you on-demand traffic and weather updates, and can also control smart home products. In addition, Ivee says the device will work with Belkin Wemo, the Nest Learning Thermostat, Philips Hue, SmartThings, and Wink. You can even contact emergency services using Ivee Voice.

Clara Labs' product, dubbed Clara, is a virtual assistant that when looped in on email conversations is able to schedule appointments based on the requests in those emails. SAN FRANCISCO – As with many tech company epiphanies, Maran Nelson had hers in the wee hours of the morning. It was 2 a.m., and Nelson had scheduled herself to call an important potential investor in Singapore. But her time zone calculation was off. She missed the call and the sale.

Now I am really in a mess. How does one get help from Microsoft these days? Are there courses for people who need more instruction? I have trouble even getting a regular Google page. In most respects, Windows 10 works like your old Windows 7.

So I've arrived late at the office of Viv, an artificial intelligence company based in San Jose, California. I missed my train from San Francisco after dawdling leaving my apartment and then finding the taxi service app on my phone wouldn't work. Dag Kittlaus, who I've kept waiting, looks on the bright side. "Your trials of getting here are a perfect illustration of how Viv will be helpful," he says. "Wouldn't it be nice to say'I need to get to San Jose, give me my options' and Viv would know how close you are to the train station, when the next train is coming, where the nearest cars, how much it was going to cost…" Kittlaus is the co-founder and CEO of Viv, a three-year-old AI startup backed by $30m, including funds from Iconiq Capital, which helps manage the fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy tech executives. In a blocky office building in San Jose's downtown, the company is working on what Kittlaus describes as a "global brain" – a new form of voice-controlled virtual personal assistant.

It started as a normal email exchange with a tech CEO. He was up for a coffee, and passed me to his assistant to find a date. But then it turned a bit strange. Her emails were too good: all written in the same carefully casual, slightly humourless style. All sent at socially convincing times.

A "smart" Barbie doll that can have "conversations" with children should not go on sale, privacy advocates have said. Billed as the world's first "interactive doll", the toy uses voice recognition technology similar to that employed by Apple's Siri and Google's Now digital assistants to understand what a child is saying to Barbie and respond. However, privacy advocates are worried about the use of voice recognition technology that sends recordings of children to third-party companies for processing, potentially revealing his or her intimate thoughts and details. "If I had a young child, I would be very concerned that my child's intimate conversations with her doll were being recorded and analysed," said Professor Angela Campbell of Georgetown University law school. "In Mattel's demo, Barbie asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child, her interests, and her family. This information could be of great value to advertisers and be used to market unfairly to children."

Players of the video game Halo will be familiar with Cortana, an artificial intelligence character. Now it's arriving on Microsoft's Windows Phone smartphone as a virtual assistant to take on Apple's Siri and Google Now. The move is one of a number unveiled by Microsoft at its annual Build conference in San Francisco on Wednesday as it seeks to gain traction in a highly competitive and lucrative market for smartphones. The most dramatic for handset makers - though not initially users - is that Microsoft will make both Windows Phone and Windows licences free for use on devices with screens smaller than 9in diagonally. That has been seen as an acknowledgement that the huge success of Google's free Android mobile OS, which dominates worldwide smartphone sales, has made it impossible for Microsoft to charge for software on those devices.

In an unjustly dark and dusty corner of YouTube is a badly compiled video slideshow of Alan Rickman in various stages of monochrome moodiness. It has the look of something slapped together late one night by a distracted student who should have been revising and YouTube is hardly the most salubrious home for Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. But Rickman's reading is heavenly – he oozes through it: I found it by following some piece of internet flotsam or other – one of those things you end up doing online when you're almost certainly on deadline. But it came to mind again when the female voice of Siri – the voice control feature on Apple's more recent iPhones – was tracked down recently in the US. It's a woman called Susan Bennett, who has variously voiced a cash machine, phone systems and help messages for Delta Airlines.

The simplest explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in administrative roles--and that the makers of digital assistants are influenced by these social expectations. "It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes," the Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, told CNN in 2011. "It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices." Which sounds nice, but doesn't necessarily hold up to cultural scrutiny. Just ask any woman who works in radio about how much unsolicited criticism she receives about the way she talks.