Apple's Siri is dropping new hints ahead of the iPhone 6s event this week -- though they're mostly frustrating jokes. The company's invites teased the event with the tagline "Hey Siri, give us a hint". Ever since then, excited fans have been asking the digital assistant for some idea of what might be going on -- and having little look. But Apple seems to be loading new hints into the digital assistant. While none of the updates actually say very much, they do at least offer new ways of being frustrated.

Do we want our phones, tablets and watches to have a personality? Would we like them to be meek and compliant, bold and outspoken or hovering somewhere in between? This week it was discovered that Apple's voice assistant, Siri, certainly doesn't mess about if anyone dares to ask how tall former American Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner is. "Caitlyn Jenner is 6ft 2in tall," it replies, with no reference to the recent transitioning of arguably the world's most famous transgender woman. Siri has since been widely applauded for having no truck with people who insist on using Jenner's old name, but others have railed against the "left-leaning tech elites" who dared to program Siri to respond in such a way.

At Mobile World Congress on Monday, Sony unveiled a trio of smartphones as part of its new X series, which focus on the core smartphone features customers are most concerned about: camera, battery life and design. After the announcement, Jun Makino, senior product manager at Sony Mobile, told International Business Times that the next 12 months will be crucial for the company's smartphone division. "[In] 2016, we obviously need to deliver profit, and that is something the company is committed to," Makino says. Key to that success could be a range of new accessories, like the just-announced Xperia Ear, which promises an always-on, voice-activated digital assistant in your ear. Sony has confirmed it is working on a smartphone VR headset that will take on Samsung's Gear VR market-leading device.

The launch of the Apple iPhone 6S is just days away, but the development of the company's line of handsets doesn't stop for anything. While the limits imposed by physics mean a smartphone can only get so much lighter and thinner, one area where the iPhone can still improve exponentially is in its smarts -- and that is where the firm is putting a lot of its focus. According to an analysis of job openings posted by Apple Inc. that was carried out by Reuters, the company is currently looking for at least 86 artificial-intelligence experts in the area of machine learning alone, while also seeking prospective employees with doctorates specializing in AI. With the amount of data being collected from users' computers and smartphones growing rapidly, companies are looking at developing systems that will allow them to leverage this information to deliver more tailored services to their customers. While Apple's voice-activated personal assistant Siri launched on the iPhone long before Google Now or Microsoft's Cortana did on Android devices or Windows Phone, both competitors have now eclipsed Apple's technology by serving up information they believe users want based on time or location, rather than simply based on requests made by users.

Amazon introduced Thursday two gadgets similar to its voice-controlled Echo speaker, which can be used to check the weather, order Domino's pizza or hail an Uber car. The Amazon Tap, a portable speaker that streams music, sells for $129.99. The $89.99 Echo Dot is a hockey puck-shaped device that responds to prompts to control smart appliances and connects to external speakers. For now, the Echo Dot is available only to Amazon Prime members who already have the original Echo device and Amazon's Fire TV set-top box. The original Echo, launched in 2014, is larger and cannot connect to external speakers.

Cubic's intelligence core makes it a friend. Like a human, Cubic becomes familiar with your interests and personality the more time you spend with it; the cloud-based mind is always updating. If you continue to make Game of Thrones references, Cubic will keep track of the next episode and update you on the date, or offer Game of Thrones jokes. The patented multi-topic conversation system also gives Cubic long-term memory for a more natural speech. Later, you can command "And the ones in the bedroom."

Making things simple is hard,

Guile 3D Studio is a Brazilian company founded in 2001 by Guile Lindroth, a system analyst, artificial intelligence specialist and 3D graphic artist. For the past six years, Guile and his team have developed their own technology, for an Artificial Intelligence and a Real Time Graphic Engines, as well as a unique photo-realistic Virtual Human interface. The result is an amazing AI assistant called Denise. Once installed on your computer Denise is able to execute tasks on your behalf by typing or even speaking your request. She can manage your diary for appointments and meetings, check and send emails, search the web, draw up itineraries, call someone through Skype, give you the weather forecast and the day's news, upload images on Picasa and videos on YouTube, and much more.

As conceived by its creators, Siri was supposed to be a "do engine," something that would allow people to hold conversations with the Internet. While a search engine used stilted keywords to create lists of links, a do engine could carry a conversation, then decide and act. Had one too many drinks? The ability to coordinate a Google search for a ride home might elude you, but a do engine could translate a muttered, "I'm drunk take me home," into a command to send a car service to your location. The startup's goal was not to build a better search engine, but to pioneer an entirely new paradigm for accessing the Internet, one that would let artificially intelligent agents summon the answers people needed, rather than pull relevant resources for humans to consult on their own.

Since emerging from bankruptcy in 2010, Spansion has focused on NOR flash memory. Sales of its chips for use in dashboards, entertainment systems and other embedded car applications accounted for a third of its $220 million revenue in the fourth quarter.