Most of us will be familiar with Siri, the personal assistant that lives inside your iPhone, answering questions, checking the weather, and setting your morning alarms. Now imagine Siri on a whole other level. Those of you that have recently updated your Apple devices to iOS 10 might have noticed the bot features that have been integrated into the messaging application. Bots are more accessible than ever, and can be reached without having to go at all out of your way. In fact, you could be using them regularly without even knowing it.

Microsoft is doubling down on its efforts to create better AI, with the establishment of a dedicated research group of over 5,000 staff to make Cortana and its other products much smarter. The decision taken by Microsoft to form a department solely focused on AI is no surprise, given the recent announcement of its involvement in the newly formed Partnership on AI to benefit People and Society. The partnership – that also includes Google, Facebook, Amazon and IBM, among others – is an attempt to democratise AI technology for the good of humankind. However, this doesn't prevent Microsoft from going it alone to compete with Google Now, Siri and Alexa in the intelligent personal assistant game. In a statement, Microsoft said that the division of 5,000 staff will be led by Microsoft veteran Harry Shum, who has worked in research and Bing engineering within the company.

What's Google got up its sleeve? We'll find out Tuesday, Oct. 4, when the company is holding an event in San Francisco. Google is expected to use the event to show off new smartphones and other hardware, as well as offer more information about its Internet-connected speaker, a rival to Amazon's popular Echo device. While Google hasn't said exactly what's in store for the event, the rumor mill is flush with speculation. And the company often releases new hardware right about this time of year.

Amazon has launched a 2.5 million competition for teams of students to create an artificial intelligence charming enough that people can chat to it about celebrity gossip and sports. The'Alexa Prize' is named after the service that powers Amazon's voice-activated smart speaker, the Amazon Echo. The goal of the inaugural competition is to build a'socialbot' for Alexa that will converse with people about popular topics and news events. The team with the highest-performing socialbot will win a 500,000 prize, while there's a 1 million for the team's university if their socialbot can chat "coherently and engagingly" with humans for 20 minutes. Up to ten teams of students will also win a 100,000 award, Alexa-powered devices, free AWS services, and support from the Alexa team.

HiringSolved, a technology company that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve problems for talent acquisition practitioners, has introduced RAI, an artificial intelligence assistant for recruiters. RAI is built upon HiringSolved's TalentFeed search engine, which uses a layered approach to search relevance, combining multiple scoring algorithms to find the best results. Similarly, RAI's flexible Knowledge Engine provides recruiters with detailed insights about companies, skills, title concentrations and specific people that can be sorted based on location, gender and more. Specifically regarding diversity, RAI is able to predict candidates' genders through HiringSolved's Diversity Search tool, which uses proprietary data that HiringSolved has access to, as opposed to relying on published statistics as most companies do. For instance, if a recruiter wants to know Google's male-female ratio, the engine analyzes every employee working for Google, predicting their gender with an error rate of 3%, and computing the ratio.

Artificial intelligence is quickly shaping up to be one of the key defining technology areas of our time. A day after announcing a new artificial intelligence partnership with IBM, Google, Facebook and Amazon, Microsoft is upping the ante within its own walls. The tech giant announced that it is creating a new AI business unit, the Microsoft AI and Research Group, which will be led by Microsoft Research EVP Harry Shum. Shum will oversee 5,000 computer scientists, engineers and others who will all be "focused on the company's AI product efforts," the company said in an announcement. The unit will be working on all aspects of AI and how it will be applied at the company, covering agents, apps, services and infrastructure.

Cortana has a new boss, and he has a problem: If Google's turning its Google Now digital assistant into a chatbot, should Microsoft do the same with Cortana? In 2014, Microsoft first unveiled Cortana, the digital assistant within Windows 10. Interacting with Cortana was simple: You asked a question, she responded. In the last few months, however, Google's Assistant has offered an alternative: a chatbot that interacts with users via an ongoing stream of text and images. In an interview with PCWorld, Shum said he hasn't ruled out adding a Cortana chatbot to its roster of digital assistants.

The "Ok Google" command has expanded since the debut of Android KitKat, allowing devices to respond in various smart ways to those two words. Now, Google Maps on Android has this ability too, whether you're in the middle of a road trip or doing something else. Once it's enabled in settings, you can choose whether it works only while Maps is open or from any screen. Say the magic phrase then follow it up with something like "find a gas station" or "How's traffic ahead?" and it will let you know. Existing Google Maps voice commands like "What's my ETA?" work too, plus new addition like the ability to turn traffic display on or off.

If you add them all up, Google actually makes a lot of gadgets. It sells Nexus phones, Chromebook Pixels, Pixel C tablets, Nest smart-home products, cardboard VR viewers, Chromecast and Chromecast Audio, pretty Wi-Fi routers, even weird custom phone cases. But you'd never think of Google as a hardware company, because there's no rhyme or reason to any of it. Some things are made for developers, others to show off how great a form factor or operating system could be. Some become really expensive doorstops. I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff, too--Google's made so many small-time moves in the gadget market that it's hard to track them all.

Deep Learning/Machine Learning (General): Companies that build computer algorithms that operate based on their learnings from existing data. Examples include predictive data models and software platforms that analyze behavioral data. Deep Learning/Machine Learning (Applications): Companies that utilize computer algorithms that operate based on existing data in vertically specific use cases. Examples include using machine learning technology to detect banking fraud or to identify the top retail leads. Natural Language Processing (General): Companies that build algorithms that process human language input and convert it into understandable representations.