So I've arrived late at the office of Viv, an artificial intelligence company based in San Jose, California. I missed my train from San Francisco after dawdling leaving my apartment and then finding the taxi service app on my phone wouldn't work. Dag Kittlaus, who I've kept waiting, looks on the bright side. "Your trials of getting here are a perfect illustration of how Viv will be helpful," he says. "Wouldn't it be nice to say'I need to get to San Jose, give me my options' and Viv would know how close you are to the train station, when the next train is coming, where the nearest cars, how much it was going to cost…" Kittlaus is the co-founder and CEO of Viv, a three-year-old AI startup backed by $30m, including funds from Iconiq Capital, which helps manage the fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy tech executives. In a blocky office building in San Jose's downtown, the company is working on what Kittlaus describes as a "global brain" – a new form of voice-controlled virtual personal assistant.

It started as a normal email exchange with a tech CEO. He was up for a coffee, and passed me to his assistant to find a date. But then it turned a bit strange. Her emails were too good: all written in the same carefully casual, slightly humourless style. All sent at socially convincing times.

A "smart" Barbie doll that can have "conversations" with children should not go on sale, privacy advocates have said. Billed as the world's first "interactive doll", the toy uses voice recognition technology similar to that employed by Apple's Siri and Google's Now digital assistants to understand what a child is saying to Barbie and respond. However, privacy advocates are worried about the use of voice recognition technology that sends recordings of children to third-party companies for processing, potentially revealing his or her intimate thoughts and details. "If I had a young child, I would be very concerned that my child's intimate conversations with her doll were being recorded and analysed," said Professor Angela Campbell of Georgetown University law school. "In Mattel's demo, Barbie asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child, her interests, and her family. This information could be of great value to advertisers and be used to market unfairly to children."

Players of the video game Halo will be familiar with Cortana, an artificial intelligence character. Now it's arriving on Microsoft's Windows Phone smartphone as a virtual assistant to take on Apple's Siri and Google Now. The move is one of a number unveiled by Microsoft at its annual Build conference in San Francisco on Wednesday as it seeks to gain traction in a highly competitive and lucrative market for smartphones. The most dramatic for handset makers - though not initially users - is that Microsoft will make both Windows Phone and Windows licences free for use on devices with screens smaller than 9in diagonally. That has been seen as an acknowledgement that the huge success of Google's free Android mobile OS, which dominates worldwide smartphone sales, has made it impossible for Microsoft to charge for software on those devices.

In an unjustly dark and dusty corner of YouTube is a badly compiled video slideshow of Alan Rickman in various stages of monochrome moodiness. It has the look of something slapped together late one night by a distracted student who should have been revising and YouTube is hardly the most salubrious home for Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. But Rickman's reading is heavenly – he oozes through it: I found it by following some piece of internet flotsam or other – one of those things you end up doing online when you're almost certainly on deadline. But it came to mind again when the female voice of Siri – the voice control feature on Apple's more recent iPhones – was tracked down recently in the US. It's a woman called Susan Bennett, who has variously voiced a cash machine, phone systems and help messages for Delta Airlines.

The simplest explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in administrative roles--and that the makers of digital assistants are influenced by these social expectations. "It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes," the Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, told CNN in 2011. "It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices." Which sounds nice, but doesn't necessarily hold up to cultural scrutiny. Just ask any woman who works in radio about how much unsolicited criticism she receives about the way she talks.

Well, primarily because IVR is really, really hard. It is widely recognized that voice-to-text with your phone (i.e. Siri) is far from reliable. And Siri actually has a lot better data to work with. An IVR bot has to work with the low-quality audio that's transmitted through the public switched telephone network (PSTN).

You know what you never see in science fiction movies? Why should Tony Stark mess around with stuff like Clear, Asana, or Getting Things Done when he can just bark vaguely worded orders at Jarvis, his artificially intelligent digital assistant? Obviously that makes for better visuals in the Iron Man franchise–but David Allen, creator and evangelist of GTD, is apparently working on a "meta-app" that sounds pretty darn Jarvis-like. According to Fast Company, "What Allen has sought, for nearly three decades now, is a digital tool that actually abstracts list-making out of Getting Things Done, and offers instead more time to think about acting out the items on those lists." In Allen's own words, he laments the fact that "with (today's) GTD'apps,' you still have to think about what you want to accomplish… What I'm seeking is, could somebody, some system, please embody my intelligence about how I want to have data structured, and how I want it to come out?" Allen is collaborating with Intentional Software on the still-secret app, and most of the interview consists of Allen's hand-wavey descriptions of this "obsessively helpful, completely app-agnostic dashboard."

In the movie Her, which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture this year, a middle-aged writer named Theodore Twombly installs and rapidly falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system who christens herself Samantha. Samantha lies far beyond the faux "artificial intelligence" of Google Now or Siri: she is as fully and unambiguously conscious as any human. The film's director and writer, Spike Jonze, employs this premise for limited and prosaic ends, so the film limps along in an uncanny valley, neither believable as near-future reality nor philosophically daring enough to merit suspension of disbelief. Nonetheless, Her raises questions about how humans might relate to computers. Twombly is suffering a painful separation from his wife; can Samantha make him feel better?

During which season of the year would a rabbit's fur be thickest? A computer program called Aristo can tell you because it read about bears growing thicker pelts during winter in a fourth-grade study guide, and it knows rabbits are mammals, too. Aristo is being developed by researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, who want to give machines a measure of common sense about the world. The institute's CEO, Oren Etzioni, says the best way to benchmark the development of their digital offspring is to use tests designed for schoolchildren. He's trying to convince other AI researchers to adopt standardized school tests as a way to measure progress in the field.