You know what you never see in science fiction movies? Why should Tony Stark mess around with stuff like Clear, Asana, or Getting Things Done when he can just bark vaguely worded orders at Jarvis, his artificially intelligent digital assistant? Obviously that makes for better visuals in the Iron Man franchise–but David Allen, creator and evangelist of GTD, is apparently working on a "meta-app" that sounds pretty darn Jarvis-like. According to Fast Company, "What Allen has sought, for nearly three decades now, is a digital tool that actually abstracts list-making out of Getting Things Done, and offers instead more time to think about acting out the items on those lists." In Allen's own words, he laments the fact that "with (today's) GTD'apps,' you still have to think about what you want to accomplish… What I'm seeking is, could somebody, some system, please embody my intelligence about how I want to have data structured, and how I want it to come out?" Allen is collaborating with Intentional Software on the still-secret app, and most of the interview consists of Allen's hand-wavey descriptions of this "obsessively helpful, completely app-agnostic dashboard."

In the movie Her, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, a middle-aged writer named Theodore Twombly installs and rapidly falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system who christens herself Samantha. Samantha lies far beyond the faux "artificial intelligence" of Google Now or Siri: she is as fully and unambiguously conscious as any human. The film's director and writer, Spike Jonze, employs this premise for limited and prosaic ends, so the film limps along in an uncanny valley, neither believable as near-future reality nor philosophically daring enough to merit suspension of disbelief. Nonetheless, Her raises questions about how humans might relate to computers. Twombly is suffering a painful separation from his wife; can Samantha make him feel better?

During which season of the year would a rabbit's fur be thickest? A computer program called Aristo can tell you because it read about bears growing thicker pelts during winter in a fourth-grade study guide, and it knows rabbits are mammals, too. Aristo is being developed by researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, who want to give machines a measure of common sense about the world. The institute's CEO, Oren Etzioni, says the best way to benchmark the development of their digital offspring is to use tests designed for schoolchildren. He's trying to convince other AI researchers to adopt standardized school tests as a way to measure progress in the field.

In a small, dark, room off a long hallway within a sprawling complex of buildings in Silicon Valley, an array of massive flat-panel displays and video cameras track Grit Denker's every move. Denker, a senior computer scientist at the nonprofit R&D institute SRI, is showing off Bright, an intelligent assistant that could someday know what information you need before you even ask. Initially, Bright is meant to cut down on the cognitive overload faced by workers in high-stress, data-intensive jobs like emergency response and network security. Bright may, for instance, aid network administrators in trying to stop the spread of a fast-moving virus by quickly providing crucial infection information, or help 911 operators send the right kind of assistance to the scene of an accident. But like many other technologies developed at SRI, such as the digital personal assistant Siri (now owned by Apple), Bright could eventually trickle down to laptops and smartphones.

In online advertising lingo, the acronym CPC refers to "cost per click"--the amount an advertiser pays whenever someone clicks on an ad. If voice-recognition technology company Nuance gets its way, though, it could soon have an additional meaning: "cost per conversation." Nuance is today announcing Voice Ads, a platform that will let companies create ads that people can talk to on smartphones and tablets. Mike McSherry, vice president of advertising and content at Nuance, says these could range from car ads that let you ask questions about the vehicle shown to ads for a sports network that allow you to get information about who won last night's game or what time tonight's game starts. The company has lined up partnerships with several ad agencies including Digitas, OMD, and Leo Burnett, as well as with mobile ad distribution networks JumpTap, Millennial Media, and Ad Marvel.

Computer scientist Jeffrey Bigham has created a speech-recognition program that combines the best talents of machines and people. Though voice recognition programs like Apple's Siri and Nuance's Dragon are quite good at hearing familiar voices and clearly dictated words, the technology still can't reliably caption events that present new speakers, accents, phrases, and background noises. People are pretty good at understanding words in such situations, but most of us aren't fast enough to transcribe the text in real time (that's why professional stenographers can charge more than $100 an hour). This rapid-fire crowd-computing experiment could be a big help for deaf and hearing-impaired people. It also could also provide new ways to enhance voice recognition applications like Siri in areas where they struggle. Scribe's algorithms direct human workers to type out fragments of what they hear in a speech.

One of the most interesting threads of innovation in computing over the past 12 months can be traced back to the preceding year. In 2011, Apple's virtual assistant Siri showed how software and computers could be more than just tools--something closer to collaborators. In 2012, Apple's competitors extended that notion in ways that could shape all kinds of technology for years to come. The company that first created Siri, SRI, created a similar system capable of working as a bank teller. Meanwhile, Google launched two alternative versions of a mobile assistant.

You might not have heard of iFlyTek. The company is hardly a household name in its domestic market of China, either. But it has a vice-like grip on over 80 percent of the speech technology market in the People's Republic, heading an ecosystem of over 10,000 partners and developers and with user numbers in the hundreds of millions. The company was founded in 1999 by Liu Qingfeng and five other students from the University of Science and Technology of China, widely recognized as one of the nation's preëminent research institutions. They took advantage of research conducted at the university's National Intelligent Computer R&D Center and the Human-Machine Speech Communication Laboratory.

The mobile phone has long ceased being a simple two-way communication device: today's handheld is a mini personal computer, complete with multimedia players, maps, and Web browsers. Now researchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) want to push the phone farther. They have developed software that turns a phone into a thoughtful personal assistant, one that helps people find fun things to do. The software, called Magitti, uses a combination of cues–including the time of day, a person's location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages–to infer her interests. It then shows a helpful list of suggestions, including concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.

The Amazon Echo was the one of the darlings of the online retailer's record-breaking holiday season, so it was only a matter of time before a competitor popped out something similar. That competitor will be LG with its SmartThinQ hub, which looks very similar to the Echo and includes a large speaker for streaming music. But LG's device will focus on the connected home--monitoring various sensors and monitoring and controlling smart home appliances--where the Echo is more of a personal digital assistant. To that end, the SmartThinQ will support the Z-Wave, ZigBee, and Bluetooth protocols, as well as Wi-Fi and the AllJoyn Internet of Things platform. Also unlike the Echo, LG's SmartThinQ will have a 3.5-inch LCD on its angled top, which will display notifications from connected devices as well as reminders from personal calendars.