Today, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible with artificial intelligence (A.I.) and how individuals will interact with its various forms. Every single aspect of our society -- from cars to houses to products to services -- will be reimagined and redesigned to incorporate A.I. A child born in the year 2030 will not comprehend why his or her parents once had to manually turn on the lights in the living room. In the future, the smart home will seamlessly know the needs, wants, and habits of the individuals who live in the home prior to them taking an action. Before we arrive at this future, it is helpful to take a step back and reimagine how we design cars, houses, products, and services. We are just beginning to see glimpses of this future with the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart voice assistants.

I recently spent a few days with my family at a ski lodge in the Sierras. While we were there, we noticed a young French couple who spent the vast majority of their time sitting by the fire, staring at a tiny Android tablet, flipping through a guidebook, and making notes in a paper calendar. For two or three days, while we were out skiing through the sublimely silent woods, learning how to snowboard on the bunny slope, and sitting in the hot tub underneath the misty evening skies, these two sad, beautiful foreigners were sitting in the lodge, trying to plan their trip. A similar experience motivated Travis Katz to create Gogobot, a social travel recommendation engine that helps you plan your trip quickly and efficiently by using the expertise of your Facebook and Twitter networks. Katz, while working for MySpace in London a few years ago, spent so much time researching and planning European trips that he wound up missing many of the actual trips.

The Amazon Echo is much more than just a connected speaker. Paired with its Alexa voice-enabled assistant, the cylinder of sound is a new platform on which people can access cutting edge products and services like Uber and Spotify. But like most tech, you only get out of the Echo it what you put into it. These 10 Echo "skills" (Amazon's name for Echo apps) will turn your Echo from a headline-reading automaton into a true digital assistant, capable of informing, entertaining, informing, and even challenging you. You can add them to your Echo via Amazon's Alexa companion smartphone app.

Across Silicon Valley, technology companies are scrambling to make their software smarter with the help of artificial intelligence. Both Apple and Google have made significant improvements to their virtual assistants, Siri and Google Now, that help them better understand what a user might need before he or she asks. Meanwhile, Facebook has unveiled plans to create its own intelligent chat bot that can perform tasks on your behalf. As of this week, Apple has more firepower in the AI department. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has purchased Emotient, a company that uses artificial intelligence to interpret a person's emotions, The Wall Street Journal first reported Thursday.

The future has not only arrived -- it's been here for years. You've just probably been too bogged down in the digital drudgery of your life to notice. But it's not too late to get onboard with the coming times. In fact, machine learning will get you there before you know it. Machine learning lets computers learn tasks they weren't specifically programmed to do.

For most of my 35-year technology career, fights over operating systems have dominated the landscape. First, it was MS-DOS againt the original Apple II OS. Then it shifted to Microsoft's Windows vs. the Mac OS. These wars have become ideological, with fanboys and devout followers in each camp. At Google's I/O event this year, the company announced Now On Tap. It's a new version of Google Now, which uses context to make your smartphone more useful.

The way to make a social home robot seems to be pretty standardized: basically, you cram a tablet computer into a cute robot body with some degrees of freedom and do your best to make sure that your voice recognition and conversation algorithms are as good of an experience as you possibly can, using a screen to help you out when necessary. This is fine, if you can get it to work well, but there's a concern that it's just going to turn into an experience that's essentially talking to a gussied-up version of your phone. A group of researchers including Michal Luria, Guy Hoffman, Benny Megidish, Oren Zuckerman, Roberto Aimi, and Sung Park from IDC Herzliya, Cornell, and SK Telecom have developed a prototype social robot called Vyo. Vyo is "a personal assistant serving as a centralized interface for smart home devices." Nothing new there, but what sets Vyo apart is how you interact with it: it combines non-anthropomorphic design with anthropomorphic expressiveness and a tactile object-based control system into a social robot that's totally, adorably different.

She was smart, feisty, and sometimes pensive. Sam was easy to talk to and brimming with personality. The AI from Spike Jonze's 2013 movie caught our attention not just because it had the knowledge base of a thousand IBM Watsons, but also because conversations with Samantha were like chats with a close friend. Over the last few years, robot researchers Dr. Crystal Chao and Professor Andrea Thomaz at Georgia Tech have been devising a new way to build humanity and personality into human-robot dialogues. It starts with rethinking the way we talk to machines.

An independent Windows Phone developer has created an app for Microsoft's mobile platform that will attempt to outmatch Apple's intelligent voice-controlled assistant Siri. Ask Ziggy for Windows Phone is a free ad-free mobile app that can perform similar tasks to the iOS 5 voice assistant. "Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The transcribed text is analyzed for patterns to detect commands or general queries. Commands are interpreted and routed to routine phone tasks such as emailing, texting, calling, social network updates, and getting directions," said Shai Leib, the app's developer, told WPcentral.

The brightest light in Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) quarterly earnings report came from sales of its iPhone 4S, whose most defining feature is the voice recognition assistant Siri. The phone's eye popping growth, particularly in Asia where it launched in January, was likely behind Nuance's (NASDAQ:NUAN) upside guidance issued on April 26th. Of course, consumer sales to OEMs like Apple still account for less revenue than Nuance's healthcare division, which is riding a wave higher in medical transcription. But, voice driven consumer electronics are increasingly important to Nuance's growth story. Following the launch of the 4S last fall, phones at Nuance were likely lit up by manufacturers looking to close the gap with Apple. In Nuance's Q4 earnings call, CEO Paul Ricci described interest in its solutions as "unprecedented".