An on-air comment by a US TV presenter activated Amazon Echo gadgets in viewers' homes across San Diego. The comment was made by presenter Jim Patton after a news item on a child who accidentally ordered a doll's house via the voice-activated gadget. Reacting to the report, Mr Patton said: "I love the little girl saying'Alexa ordered me a dollhouse'." This reportedly prompted Echo devices in some homes to wake up and try to order some of the toys. The original CW6 TV report Mr Patton reacted to was about six-year-old Brooke Neitzel from Dallas who had been talking to her family's Echo Dot while playing.

At CES 2016, Microsoft announced that it is building a platform to enable automobile manufacturers to deliver connected car experiences to customers. Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform is a set of services that is integrated with Azure, Cortana, Office 365, Power BI, and Skype. In the last couple of years, Microsoft has doubled down its investment in machine learning (ML) and analytics. The company is embedding ML in almost all its products. Powered by Azure, these new set of services such as Azure ML, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Cortana Intelligence Suite takes advantage of the abundant compute and storage resources exposed by the underlying infrastructure.

Volkswagen recently announced it's adding Amazon's virtual assistant to its lineup. That means you'll be able to buy things while on the road. Sean Dowling (@seandowlingtv) has more. A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Volkswagen recently announced it's adding Amazon's virtual assistant to its lineup.

Amazon Echo is apparently always ready, always listening and always getting smarter. So goes the spiel about the sleek, black, voice-controlled speaker, Amazon's bestselling product over Christmas, with millions now sold worldwide. The problem is that when you have Alexa, the intelligent assistant that powers Amazon Echo, entering millions of homes to do the shopping, answer questions, play music, report the weather and control the thermostat, there are bound to be glitches. And so to Dallas, Texas, where a six-year-old girl made the mistake of asking Alexa: "Can you play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?" Alexa promptly complied by ordering a $170 (£140) KidKraft doll's house and, for reasons known only to the virtual assistant, four pounds of sugar cookies.

It is supposed to make life easier – but owners of the new Amazon Echo have fallen foul of the high-tech gadget's automatic features. Owners of the device been warned after a number accidentally ordered dollhouses that were being discussed on a TV show. The Amazon Echo, which includes a virtual assistant called Alexa, was a popular Christmas gift this year. Alexa performs tasks at the vocal request of her owner – including internet shopping. But a recent incident in America has revealed the technology could prove costly to unsuspecting users.

Since the earliest days of the Internet, most government agencies have eagerly explored how to use technology to better deliver services to citizens, businesses and other public-sector organizations. Early on, observers recognized that these efforts often varied widely in their implementation, and so researchers developed various frameworks to describe the different stages of growth and development of e-government. While each model is different, they all identify the same general progression from the informational, for example websites that make government facts available online, to the interactive, such as two-way communication between government officials and users, to the transactional, like applications that allow users to access government services completely online. However, we will soon see a new stage of e-government: the perceptive. The defining feature of the perceptive stage will be that the work involved in interacting with government will be significantly reduced and automated for all parties involved.

Large platform companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft want to provide the operating system for our lives, and they will fight hard in 2017 to establish their foothold in the emerging technologies we will likely come to rely on in the future. Those with the most complete product offerings have an advantage. Since people like to buy products that play well with the other products they already own, a platform company risks losing customers by not having a product in a hot category. These large companies already have an advantage over smaller companies due to their massive R&D budgets and their ability to hire the best people to build the stuff we want now and to anticipate the technology we'll want in the future. And if a hot product is developed by some ambitious startup, these giants can easily swoop in and acquire both the product and the people who created it.

One of the undisputable realities of moving into a digital work era is the continuous improvement in technologies which mimic and replicate what human employees are doing. The introduction of'bots' into the workplace to perform logic-based and repetitive tasks is becoming a common occurrence. These task robots are able to perform activities faster, with greater accuracy and more efficiently that their human colleagues. In fact their capacity is close to 700 per cent greater than the human employee, who generally works at a 60 per cent utilisation rate for 7-8 hours a day, can be absent for a variety of reasons, doesn't work 7 days a week, and who's productivity is influenced by a plethora of human frailties. It's no wonder'bots' are attractive to organisations for this type of work.

With the 2016 coming close, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has completed his personal challenge to built "Jarvis," his AI-powered personal assistant. In his lengthy blog post, Zuck describes the types of tasks his Jarvis bot can accomplish. The personal assistant or what few call a butler, is customized to perform multiple actions at Mark's residence. Mark's simple AI to run his home -- like Jarvis in Iron Man, uses several AI techniques including speech and face recognition, reinforcement learning, natural language processing. It is written in PHP, Objective C and Python. In coming years, Zuckerberg has expansion plans for his AI Bot, he cited building an Android app and setting up the Jarvis voice terminals in the entire house.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. I've previously written about the Golden Age of Gadgets and how China has propelled it. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the annual international show for consumer electronics held in Las Vegas, this only affirmed my position on China.