The Amazon Echo and Echo Dot were the best-selling products across Amazon this year. We are on the cusp of an era where talking to machines will be as natural as talking to humans. With artificial assistants there is a pressure to provide an experience; to give the customer an interaction that is as both useful and emotionally satisfying as talking to a human. A question to ask: Is there an imperative to make AI communicate like we do or to be understood? Will we start to change how we speak to sound more like the AI?

Just because the constant acceleration of technology advancement has become cliché doesn't mean you're prepared. You may think that's OK because everyone is in the same boat, right? Some big companies are already way ahead. And the gap between you and the leaders is getting bigger every day. Moor Insights and Strategy analyst Karl Freund put it most succinctly in a Forbes post last week: "While the big social media and internet commerce companies now think of Machine Learning as an essential foundational tool, most enterprises still have no clue where to begin in their quest to get on board and use AI." Here's a tiny sample of what you should have read last week.

After decades of screen domination, technology companies, products and, indeed, the entire tech industry, are finally starting to pivot. The target of this refocused interest? After a slow and pretty rough start with Apple's Siri several years back, the idea of voice-controlled technology devices is beginning to take hold, thanks in large part to the success of Amazon's Echo and its Alexa personal assistant. The proliferation of Alexa-enabled devices at the recent Consumer Electronics Show put an exclamation point on that development. But as cool and interesting as accurate voice recognition and simple control may be, the real impact of voice-driven computing is significantly more profound.

We're seeing a big up-take in digital personal assistants in the consumer world and in 2017 we can expect that to push into enterprise organisations. For example, Microsoft is already planning to release a Cortana personal assistant in the first quarter that will support your business productivity. It'll do things like automatically organising your meetings for you or automatically responding to certain emails with relevant responses. This will evolve over the course of the year onto bigger, better integrated things. With the power of machine learning and neural networks sitting behind all this data collection we'll start to see systems dynamically change offering better results and predictions back to our businesses.

Facebook will one day have a conversational agent with human-like intelligence. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana all currently attempt to do this, but go off script and they fail. That's just one reason why Mark Zuckerberg famously built his own AI for home use in 2016; the existing landscape didn't quite meet his needs. Of course, his company has started to build its AI platform, too--it's called Project M. M will not have human-like intelligence, but it will have intelligence in narrow domains and will learn by observing humans. And M is just one of many research projects and production AI systems being engineered to make AI the next big Facebook platform.

Adobe Sensei is a new framework launched in November last year. It uses machine learning technology and a set of artificial intelligence services built into the Adobe Cloud Platform to provided enhance user experience to applications and tools.

After the close of last year's holiday shopping season, sales of dollhouses mysteriously surged on Amazon.com. After a local news report about a six-year old who ordered a dollhouse using her parents' Amazon Echo, the anchorman said ""I love that little girl saying'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse.'" And mistakenly, Echo speakers that heard the news started making orders themselves. Enabled on every Amazon Alexa app by default, voice purchasing mines your previous Amazon purchases and other products available through the Amazon Prime subscription shopping service to let you easily order items without having to browse the company's website. So the best way to ensure something like this doesn't happen to you is to disable or restrict the feature.

These women are not metaphors, but Hustvedt casts them as little more than phantoms in her reverie. Likewise, there is a lot of performative contemplation here, during which the occasion for and specifics of the chin stroking seem to matter less than the fact that the author is stroking her chin. Take the essay "Much Ado About Hairdos." "All mammals have hair," Hustvedt begins in a characteristic rehearsal of the obvious, making a show of seeing the familiar anew. "Hair is not a body part so much as a lifeless extension of a body. Although the bulb of the follicle is alive, the hair shaft is dead and insensible."

Microsoft has showed off more of what's coming in the Creators update in April. The latest "Fast Ring" Insider Preview, released just days after the last one, notably makes it easier to work across multiple computers. Cortana now shows quick links for Edge browser websites, cloud-based documents and other recent work when you switch to a different PC. "For example, if you were working on a PowerPoint deck on your laptop, when you later return to your desktop, a link to that deck appears in the Action Center," Microsoft wrote in a lengthy blog. Edge users can now also share tabs with other apps, making it easy to switch from one browser to the next and keep your tabs intact.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Specifically, other humans who visit my home and decide to shout at it and call it'Lola' or'Alexis'. Don't pretend like it doesn't.