In a small, dark, room off a long hallway within a sprawling complex of buildings in Silicon Valley, an array of massive flat-panel displays and video cameras track Grit Denker's every move. Denker, a senior computer scientist at the nonprofit R&D institute SRI, is showing off Bright, an intelligent assistant that could someday know what information you need before you even ask. Initially, Bright is meant to cut down on the cognitive overload faced by workers in high-stress, data-intensive jobs like emergency response and network security. Bright may, for instance, aid network administrators in trying to stop the spread of a fast-moving virus by quickly providing crucial infection information, or help 911 operators send the right kind of assistance to the scene of an accident. But like many other technologies developed at SRI, such as the digital personal assistant Siri (now owned by Apple), Bright could eventually trickle down to laptops and smartphones.

In online advertising lingo, the acronym CPC refers to "cost per click"--the amount an advertiser pays whenever someone clicks on an ad. If voice-recognition technology company Nuance gets its way, though, it could soon have an additional meaning: "cost per conversation." Nuance is today announcing Voice Ads, a platform that will let companies create ads that people can talk to on smartphones and tablets. Mike McSherry, vice president of advertising and content at Nuance, says these could range from car ads that let you ask questions about the vehicle shown to ads for a sports network that allow you to get information about who won last night's game or what time tonight's game starts. The company has lined up partnerships with several ad agencies including Digitas, OMD, and Leo Burnett, as well as with mobile ad distribution networks JumpTap, Millennial Media, and Ad Marvel.

Computer scientist Jeffrey Bigham has created a speech-recognition program that combines the best talents of machines and people. Though voice recognition programs like Apple's Siri and Nuance's Dragon are quite good at hearing familiar voices and clearly dictated words, the technology still can't reliably caption events that present new speakers, accents, phrases, and background noises. People are pretty good at understanding words in such situations, but most of us aren't fast enough to transcribe the text in real time (that's why professional stenographers can charge more than $100 an hour). This rapid-fire crowd-computing experiment could be a big help for deaf and hearing-impaired people. It also could also provide new ways to enhance voice recognition applications like Siri in areas where they struggle. Scribe's algorithms direct human workers to type out fragments of what they hear in a speech.

One of the most interesting threads of innovation in computing over the past 12 months can be traced back to the preceding year. In 2011, Apple's virtual assistant Siri showed how software and computers could be more than just tools--something closer to collaborators. In 2012, Apple's competitors extended that notion in ways that could shape all kinds of technology for years to come. The company that first created Siri, SRI, created a similar system capable of working as a bank teller. Meanwhile, Google launched two alternative versions of a mobile assistant.

You might not have heard of iFlyTek. The company is hardly a household name in its domestic market of China, either. But it has a vice-like grip on over 80 percent of the speech technology market in the People's Republic, heading an ecosystem of over 10,000 partners and developers and with user numbers in the hundreds of millions. The company was founded in 1999 by Liu Qingfeng and five other students from the University of Science and Technology of China, widely recognized as one of the nation's preëminent research institutions. They took advantage of research conducted at the university's National Intelligent Computer R&D Center and the Human-Machine Speech Communication Laboratory.

The mobile phone has long ceased being a simple two-way communication device: today's handheld is a mini personal computer, complete with multimedia players, maps, and Web browsers. Now researchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) want to push the phone farther. They have developed software that turns a phone into a thoughtful personal assistant, one that helps people find fun things to do. The software, called Magitti, uses a combination of cues–including the time of day, a person's location, her past behaviors, and even her text messages–to infer her interests. It then shows a helpful list of suggestions, including concerts, movies, bookstores, and restaurants.

The Amazon Echo was the one of the darlings of the online retailer's record-breaking holiday season, so it was only a matter of time before a competitor popped out something similar. That competitor will be LG with its SmartThinQ hub, which looks very similar to the Echo and includes a large speaker for streaming music. But LG's device will focus on the connected home--monitoring various sensors and monitoring and controlling smart home appliances--where the Echo is more of a personal digital assistant. To that end, the SmartThinQ will support the Z-Wave, ZigBee, and Bluetooth protocols, as well as Wi-Fi and the AllJoyn Internet of Things platform. Also unlike the Echo, LG's SmartThinQ will have a 3.5-inch LCD on its angled top, which will display notifications from connected devices as well as reminders from personal calendars.

Tado debuted a small improvement to its smart A/C control device, offering customers the option to use Amazon's Alexa digital assistant to control Tado-connected air conditioners. To use it, all you'll need do is add the Alexa Tado skill in your Amazon account. The Tado device renders otherwise dumb air-conditioning units programmable, and multiple units can work together to control air conditioners in different rooms of your home. So a simple phrase like "Alexa, set living room to 68 degrees," or "Alexa, increment (or decrement to decrease) living room by two degrees" will change the target temperatures for the A/C units in those rooms accordingly. Tado is using Amazon's smart-home API to make its voice commands sound a little more natural.

When Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S last year, the new phone looked just like the previous one. It had a better camera and a faster chip, but it could do only one new thing: Siri. Siri, as everyone knows by now, is a software assistant that takes spoken orders. No training necessary: just hold down the "Home" button and speak casually. Siri lit the cultural world on fire. There were YouTube parodies, how-to guides and copycat apps for Android phones.

If your conversations with digital personal assistants like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, or Google Now haven't been useful enough, a new challenger of Biblical proportions is about to arrive. Gabriel, a project by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, and funded by the National Science Foundation, is a personal cognitive assistant that "whispers" instructions into a user's ear, for things like how to change a tire, perform CPR, or even assemble IKEA furniture. It would be like GPS for everyday actions, but one that knows when to shut up, according to principal investigator Mahadev Satyanarayanan. The name comes from the angel Gabriel, who Biblically served as the messenger of God. CMU's Gabriel is just a software platform, though.