When a citizen dials 311, it has been the longstanding preference by mayors to have a city employee on the other end of the line to deliver the ever-valuable personal touch. But when efficiency is the priority, are we really best served by having city employees at 311 call centers act primarily as switchboard operators, sifting through online scripts or, worse, binders or spreadsheets and responding to information requests with specifically coded responses? More often than not, citizens will call 311 with an information request -- to determine their trash pick-up day, the hours the public pool is open or another simple ask. The North Carolina Innovation Center is now using chatbots for its internal IT help desk hotline, where between 80 and 90 percent of calls are for help changing a password. Still in its experimental stage, North Carolina uses the bots to free up help center operators to handle more challenging and complex concerns.

Adobe this week published three videos on YouTube, sharing details on what its research team is working on for inclusion in future Adobe products like Photoshop. A voice-based AI assistant like Siri is Adobe's most interesting project, which Adobe says is the first step towards a voice-based interface that would let Adobe users search and edit images in unique ways. According to Adobe, its team is working to combine voice interaction with "a deep understanding" of creative workflows. In its current incarnation, the speech recognition system can accept natural language instructions or image editing, directly on a device or through a cloud-based Natural Language understanding service. Adobe is also working on a new digital face painting application that would allow users to paint on a still image of a person, using blending and rotating tools to paint on all sides of the face.

Bots and artificial intelligence company Kasisto today announced that it has raised $9.2 million. The money will be used to bolster the company's personal finance bot KAI and expand its AI virtual assistant offerings to markets beyond finance. When asked by VentureBeat, the company declined to state which industries it plans to enter but said that specifics would be shared at a later date. Kasisto is a spinoff of SRI International, creator of Apple virtual assistant Siri. Kasisto launched AI-powered KAI for personal finance and banking last June.

On this week's DoubleX Gabfest, Invisibilia co-host Hanna Rosin and New York magazine's Noreen Malone are joined by New York magazine's David Wallace-Wells to explore Donald Trump's recent golden shower scandal. Then David Plotz calls in to discuss the Rockettes performing at the inauguration. Last, the gabbers talk about the issues with assigning gender to our virtual assistants.

From Siri creator Dag Kittlaus comes Viv, a product that aims to be the next generation personal assistant. Kittlaus sat down with USA TODAY's Ed Baig to talk about Viv and where he thinks its headed. SAN FRANCISCO -- No matter what tech innovations Dag Kittlaus creates in the coming years, the 49-year-old speech recognition expert will be best known as the man who sold Siri to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Now, strangely, the two figures have something else in common. According to an interview with Recode's Kara Swisher, Kittlaus reveals that in a routine screening he discovered he had the same rare type of pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer that felled Jobs in 2011.

One of the newer technologies getting buzz these days is the voice-enabled digital assistant – and new data from Accenture [pdf] suggests that it's not all hype. In fact, the use of embedded voice-enabled digital assistants in smartphones and PC/laptops has reached the mainstream among 14-17-year-olds, per Accenture's survey of almost 26,000 consumers across 26 countries. The results indicate that 31% of 14-17-year-olds regularly use voice-enabled digital assistants, with another 20% just getting started using them. Adoption – not surprisingly – declines with age, but still remains above one-third (38%) of Millennials (18-34) and higher than one-quarter (27%) of Gen Xers (35-54). Although only 15% of Boomers (55) are currently using voice-enabled digital assistants, another 35% are interested in doing so.

The Internet of Things still mostly feels like the Internet of Crap, but there's one ray of hope in the connected home on which plenty of companies are jumping aboard: Amazon's Alexa. In particular, I'm talking about the voice-powered ecosystem that's quickly grown around the company's virtual assistant. At CES, we saw Alexa integration in Dish's upcoming Hopper, washing machines and, much to our delight, a dancing robot. It's even heading outside the home: Both Ford and Volkswagen are bringing Alexa to their cars for hands-free commands. In a little over two years, Alexa has gone from being a baffling product (a connected speaker from Amazon, really?!) to an essential feature for any connected device.

HTC is launching a new smartphone with a virtual assistant that it says can make suggestions without being prompted, the company announced on Jan. 12. The phone costs $749, about the same as most premium smartphones, and will begin shipping in mid-March. The phone, called the U Ultra phone, will include a new virtual aide called the HTC Sense Companion. That new feature comes after both Apple and Google have made significant improvements to their own respective digital helpers over the past year. HTC is touting its AI aide as a proactive assistant that can show relevant reminders and alerts throughout the day, similar to what Google Now has been doing for years.

With much of the tech world recalling the iPhone's original announcement earlier this week, it's easy to forget how much the smartphone market has changed in the decade since Apple's hit phone was announced. As with BlackBerry and Palm, HTC was one of the early innovators in the space that has watched its standing fall in recent years to Apple's product. In a bid to recapture some of the lost glory, the company on Thursday announced a new smartphone it claims is specifically focused on the user, the HTC U Ultra. Featuring a new "Sense Companion," HTC's own digital assistant to rival Google Assistant, the company is placing an emphasis on providing information before you need it as a way to stand out. If snow is in the forecast, for example, the phone will alert you to dress warmly or leave a little earlier. It also can recommend a restaurant and then book a reservation.

This may be the year when an artificial intelligence-based voice assistant becomes a regular smartphone feature, like front-facing cameras already are. While 2016 saw Pixel's Google Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa, 2017 has started with HTC Sense Companion, and we are still waiting for the impending Samsung Bixby launch. Along with its new phones -- the U Ultra and U Play -- HTC introduced Thursday a new voice assistant called the Sense Companion. The voice-controlled assistant will let you issue commands to your phone, open apps, set reminders and more, all without physically touching the device. The Sense Companion will utilize the secondary screen on the U Ultra, rather than blocking your view of the main screen, in case you want to use it for doing something else.