In an ordinary conference room in this city of start-ups, a group of engineers sat down to order pizza in an entirely new way. "Get me a pizza from Pizz'a Chicago near my office," one of the engineers said into his smartphone. It was their first real test of Viv, the artificial-intelligence technology that the team had been quietly building for more than a year. Everyone was a little nervous. Then, a text from Viv piped up: "Would you like toppings with that?"

There comes a point in every adult's life when one stops and thinks: I could really use a personal assistant. The Washington Post's budget, however, doesn't stretch to provide each reporter with a personal aide. But thanks to the magic of technology, I have regular access to five digital assistants: Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google Now and an email-based scheduling assistant called Amy. It should be a breeze for anyone trying to get themselves organized as part of a New Year's resolution. But, if I'm perfectly frank, I'm really no closer to getting anything done.

Apple's digital assistant gets an upgrade in the newest version of iOS. Users will no longer have to press a button to summon Siri, instead they can set their smartphones to constantly listen to their conversations -- just waiting for an opportunity to give directions or tell a joke. But privacy advocates worry that this type of technology could become a hazard that users aren't prepared for. "When you enter the realm of always-on devices, there are real privacy implications that need to be addressed," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). "Even if the user of the device consents, it doesn't necessarily mean other people who are there consent to the routine recording of everything they might say."

The problem with using the human voice to control computers is well known and well documented: it doesn't always work. You can find yourself adopting the aggressive tone of a belligerent tourist in a foreign land while digital assistants employ a range of apologetic responses ("I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that", "I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question"). We throw our arms up and complain about their shortcomings. Plenty of us have tried them, plenty of us have dismissed them as a waste of time. We tend not to hear about them doing the job perfectly well, because few people write impassioned tweets or blog posts about things that work flawlessly.

Siri: Okay, from now on I'll call you "an ambulance." Apple fixed this error shortly after its virtual assistant was first released in 2011. But a new contest shows that computers still lack the common sense required to avoid such embarrassing mix-ups. The results of the contest were presented at an academic conference in New York this week, and they provide some measure of how much work needs to be done to make computers truly intelligent. The Winograd Schema Challenge asks computers to make sense of sentences that are ambiguous but usually simple for humans to parse.

NOW your phone knows you better than ever. The latest version of Apple's mobile operating system learns what your voice sounds like, and can identify you when you speak to Siri, ignoring other voices that try to butt in. Siri, the intelligent personal assistant, is not the only one who knows your voice. As learning software improves, voice-identification systems have started to creep into everyday life, from smartphones to police stations to bank call centres. More are probably on the way.

In a corner of LG's sprawling, dripping-with-technology booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center sat a circular table populated by a group of small, futuristic snowmen. Each of them sported a black touchscreen display showing a pair of electronic eyes that would intermittently squint as if they were smiling at you. On a large screen nearby, a video showed one of these gizmos, the LG Hub Robot, calling out in a soothing tone: "Hello. I learn your lifestyle to better serve you." This year's CES tech show in Las Vegas highlighted how our technology is finding its voice, with makers of cars, appliances and speakers starting to let people control their products simply by talking to them.

Microsoft is making available to its Windows Insiders testers the first Windows 10 Desktop test build that includes its new'Project Spartan' browser. Today's Windows 10 Desktop preview is the second Microsoft has made available to testers in March, and the fourth Windows 10 Desktop build the company has released as of October 1, 2014. Like Windows 10 Desktop -- which runs on PCs, laptops and tablets -- Spartan is still not feature-complete at this point. The first Spartan preview does, however, include most of the functionality that Microsoft execs showed off on January 21 during an early demo of Spartan as part of a Windows 10 press event. Specifically, the integration between Spartan and Cortana, Microsoft's personal digital assistant, is in today's Windows 10 release, as is the "Ask Cortana" user assistance technology.

Facebook's move to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered personal assistant dubbed M could be a technology step forward. But M is also going to contribute to a personal assistant bandwagon that's going to get crowded. Welcome to the world of personal assistant sprawl. Microsoft, Google and Apple all want their mobile platforms to anticipate your needs, schedule appointments, give you directions and even buy gifts for your sibling. Now Facebook is in the fray.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has often been popularly envisaged in super-smart humanoid robot form. In fact, it's more commonly implemented as behind-the-scenes algorithms that can process'big' data to accomplish a range of relatively mundane tasks far more efficiently than humans can. Few of us, yet, interact with bipedal robots or take a ride in a driverless car, but our daily lives are increasingly affected by AI systems that can recognise speech or images, or analyse patterns of online behaviour (to detect credit card fraud or serve up appropriate adverts, for example). Nor is it any surprise to find AI and automation featuring prominently on analyst firm Gartner's 2015 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, which places autonomous vehicles, for example, right at the hype-driven'Peak of Inflated Expectations': Gartner also identifies'Autonomous' as the sixth and final stage of an organisation's journey to becoming a'digital business', highlighting a range of emerging technologies as particularly relevant: Autonomous Vehicles, Bioacoustic Sensing, Biochips, Brain-Computer Interface, Digital Dexterity, Human Augmentation, Machine Learning, Neurobusiness, People-Literate Technology, Quantum Computing, Smart Advisors, Smart Dust, Smart Robots, Virtual Personal Assistants, Virtual Reality, and Volumetric and Holographic Displays. What follows hype, of course, is disillusionment: this has happened to AI before, and it's unlikely that all of the technologies flagged up in Gartner's Hype Cycle will make it to the mainstream.