Apple has a vision of a future in which the disembodied voice of Siri is your constant companion. It goes something like this: You arrive home at the end of a long day and plop down on the couch. A beer in one hand, your phone in the other, you say, "Siri, open Netflix and play The IT Crowd." Midway through the program, you feel a draft. Siri politely tells you the temperature, and asks if you'd like it raised.

CLT Blog's Justin Ruckman decoded SEC filings to turn up an intriguing recent Amazon acquisition: Yap, a Charlotte-based speech-recognition startup best known for its recently shuttered voicemail transcription app and backend services for some of Microsoft's voice-to-text application. So far, Amazon hasn't publicly commented on or even confirmed Yap's acquisition, and didn't immediately respond to our attempts to find out what it plans to do with the company. It's an uncharacteristic buy for them, since the company traditionally hasn't bothered much with voice technology. Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet doesn't even have a microphone. One enticing but unlikely possibility, dangled by CLT Blog and subsequently picked up by many bigger tech sites, is that Amazon is making a bid to compete with Siri, Apple's brand-new voice-driven interface for iPhone.

LOS ANGELES--Will.i.am sounds congested and subdued, his batteries running low after a high-octane appearance on The Ellen Show earlier that day. He's longing for 2025, when an artificial intelligence will be able to tell him to take it easy. "Will, you sound like you are stuffy," he says in the voice of this fictional AI. "What did you eat recently? Stay away from sweets because they are causing you more mucus. You should get some rest tonight. I'm going to cancel your appointments from 7 pm. I've already bought you some epsom salts from CVS. Go and pick them up."

Wander around WIRED's San Francisco headquarters on any given day and you're likely to encounter quite a zoo: hoverboard-riding video shooters dodging begoggled editors who are testing beta VR hardware; one of our favorite TV makers coming in for a meeting; security writers debating the latest cyberwar skirmish around the corner from a conference call with the founder of the Valley's latest unicorn company; and dogs (10 of them, by my count). But this time of year, the always lively view from my desk takes on an especially electric feel as we train our focus on a new horizon. So to give you a sense of what we're gearing up to cover in 2016, I tapped the hive mind of writers and editors and pulled together a list of the big developments we expect to be following as the year unfolds. There's a lot to look forward to. Politics is all about message control, but Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Vine, et al. have rewritten the messaging playbook.

Social networks teem with harassment and trolling, so much so that companies have outsourced the work of content moderation to an army of laborers, typically overseas, often at an enormous mental and emotional toll to the workers themselves. But what if you didn't need humans to identify when online abuse was happening? If a computer was smart enough to spot cyberbullying as it happened, maybe it could be halted faster, without the emotional and financial costs that come with humans doing the job. At SRI International, the Silicon Valley incubator where Apple's Siri digital assistant was born, researchers believe they've developed algorithms that come close to doing just that. "Social networks are overwhelmed with these kinds of problems, and human curators can't manage the load," says Norman Winarsky, president of SRI Ventures.

I'm fairly new to San Francisco, so I'm still building my mental database of restaurants I like. But this weekend, I know exactly where I'm heading to for dinner: Nick's Crispy Tacos. Then, when I get home, I'm kicking back to a documentary I've never heard of, a Mongolian drama called The Cave of the Yellow Dog. An artificially intelligent algorithm told me I'd enjoy both these things. I'd like the restaurant, the machine told me, because I prefer Mexican food and wine bars "with a casual atmosphere," and the movie because "drama movies are in my digital DNA."

Viv was named after the Latin root meaning live. Its San Jose, California, offices are decorated with tchotchkes bearing the numbers six and five (VI and V in roman numerals). When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity. She was brilliant at fulfilling certain requests, like "Can you set the alarm for 6:30?" or "Call Diane's mobile phone." And she had a personality: If you asked her if there was a God, she would demur with deft wisdom. "My policy is the separation of spirit and silicon," she'd say.

For many families, the tablet has become the central, shared computing device in the home. It's a hub for learning, for entertainment, and for staying connected. But what if your tablet was even more interactive? What if it woke up when you came home, recognized your face, and suggested a couple of things you might want for dinner? What if, when asked a spoken question, it could tailor its answer directly to you, instead of just offering a blanket response? A new device called Jibo can do these things, and it could mark the next step in group computer interaction in the home.

It all started at a small academic get-together in Whistler, British Columbia. The topic was speech recognition, and whether a new and unproven approach to machine intelligence--something called deep learning--could help computers more effectively identify the spoken word. Microsoft funded the mini-conference, held just before Christmas 2009, and two of its researchers invited the world's preeminent deep learning expert, the University of Toronto's Geoff Hinton, to give a speech. Hinton's idea was that machine learning models could work a lot like neurons in the human brain. He wanted to build "neural networks" that could gradually assemble an understanding of spoken words as more and more of them arrived.

But it may soon learn to speak our language. For all the advances in the way we interact with computers -- from the graphical user interface to voice control -- the command line still serves a very important role. For developers, system administrators, and other hardcore geeks, this bare-bones interface is still the best way to build and tweak the complex computer systems that underpin our world -- despite its dependence on arcane text commands. It means memorizing all sorts of cryptic commands, things like "rm," for removing a file, or "grep," which finds particular chunks of text buried in a collection of files. That's different from the "find" command, which searches through the names of files, not their contents.