Just in time for the holidays, Windows 10's Cortana has added a new feature: list making, which you can use to add all sorts of shopping items, to-do tasks, and other items as you think of them. The new feature works on your Windows 10 PC, as well as Cortana for iOS 8.0 or later and the Cortana app for Android 4.4 and later. Microsoft also connected Cortana to its Wunderlist app, allowing access to the lists you already have in that app and easy sharing with friends. For now, the vocabulary to trigger the list command isn't that forgiving. By default, Cortana includes three lists: Grocery, Shopping, and To-Do.

Today's home cooks have more options than ever before. New technology is slowly moving into the kitchen, but an appreciation for the basics of cooking continues to grow. We spent time with both the latest kitchen tech and some classics that wouldn't be out of place in our grandparents' home, and developed this list of the best cooking and smart home tech you can buy. Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant puts your voice in control of an ever-expanding universe of smart products, and the Amazon Echo speaker remains the best choice for getting Alexa into your home. Whether you want to play music, check the news, control your lighting, keep an eye on your oven, or even play a game, the Echo has you covered with its always-on functionality.

NEW YORK--I've been a big fan of the $499 eero Wi-Fi system since February when it solved the poky networking issues and dead zones in my house that had previously made my Internet hiccup and stutter all too often. For folks with an Echo, Echo Dot or Amazon Tap, Alexa brings three skill sets to eero. You can ask Alexa to turn off the LED lights on an eero router, when, say, you want to watch a movie in pitch black or go to sleep. If you've misplaced your smartphone or some other device that's connected to Wi-Fi in your house, Alexa can help you locate it, by letting you know which eero it is closest to. And here's a feature parents may come to love.

These days everyone in the tech sector is very much excited by AI. But what does it mean to you as a business now that software suppliers and vendors have decided to include it in their tools and offers? Even though, I could argue, that AI has been around and working already in the sector for a long time anyway. At its core, AI is basically machine learning – a type of Artificial Intelligence that uses algorithms to parse (or analyse) data, extract patterns, learn and make predictions and decisions based on the insights it has uncovered. This is the fundamental mechanics behind many of the technologies we see already every day that use AI – like search engines, face recognition apps and digital assistants.

Earlier this year, Eero launched a home WiFi solution that it claimed would solve all our wireless woes. The idea behind Eero's system is simple; instead of relying on one router to connect your whole house, it uses multiple hubs. Each Eero hub combines the functions of a wireless router, a range extender and a repeater, and you can easily connect them to one another with a companion app. The whole system is essentially a wireless mesh network for the home. Months later, and Eero is unveiling a massive update that not only brings faster and better performance, but also Amazon Alexa compatibility and a slew of new app features.

We keep hearing that robots are going to take our jobs, but a company called MindMeld is giving us an idea how with its "Deep-Domain Conversational AI Platform." It'll allow bots that can essentially replace customer service agents and even baristas by answering complicated voice or text queries over Google Assistant, Amazon Echo, Facebook Messenger and other popular platforms. Uniqlo, for one, will offer a Facebook bot that can answer questions about its products, services and retail locations with more detail than ever. The "MindMeld Language Parser" helps it understand and answer questions with "human-like accuracy," whether by talk or text, the company says. It adds that while current AI toolkits from Google, Facebook and others are great, they provide "little data suitable for production-quality applications" -- in other words, they can do deep learning, but don't give companies anything to teach them.

To most people, artificial intelligence (AI) is represented in terms of robots with human-like similarities. Today's reality is that of AI powering technologies and driving companies to complete tasks and make things easier. Companies are using AI more than ever, even for tasks that you may not consider. To understand how AI impacts your business, it's important to understand exactly what artificial intelligence is. According to Merriam Webster artificial intelligence is, "an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence."

The Amazon Echo's smaller, more affordable sibling is a fail-safe gift for anyone who values convenience (and who doesn't?). Driven by Amazon's Alexa digital assistant, this unobtrusive puck puts a wealth of useful information, entertainment, and practical functionality just a voice-command away. Use the Echo Dot to control a home's lighting, play music, estimate commute times, operate a timer, answer trivia questions, read books and news bulletins aloud, provide local movie times and locations, hail an Uber, or order anything from Amazon (natch). Don't be surprised if your gift of a single Dot has the recipient buying more to fill every room.

While Home is positioned as a way to add Assistant to your domicile, it's only fully usable for a single person. You cannot have more than one account tied to Google Home, so all the user-specific data accessible on Home belongs to whoever sets it up. The only option here is to disable "personal results" so other people can't get into things like your calendar. It should be able to figure out who's who, though. Google is able to recognize voices--you train your phone's OK Google trigger so only you can set it off.

Humans are already forming relationships with their artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, so we should make that technology as emotionally aware as possible by teaching it to respond to our feelings. That is the premise of Rana el Kaliouby, cofounder and CEO of Affectiva, an MIT spinout company that sells emotion recognition technology based on her computer science PhD, which she spent building the first ever computer that can recognise emotions. The machine learning-based software uses a camera or webcam to identify parts of human faces (eyebrows, the corners of eyes, etc), classify expressions and map them onto emotions like joy, disgust, surprise, anger, and so on, in real time. "We are getting lots of interest around chatbots, self-driving cars, anything with a conversational interface. If it's interfacing with a human it needs social and emotional skills. This tech is already being integrated into robots," el Kaliouby tells Techworld.