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.

Virtual personal assistants have become another self-fulfilling prophecy of technology. When Tony Stark talks to Jarvis in Iron Man, we want that level of interaction in real life, and making that happen becomes the area of study for hundreds of software developers and researchers (including, recently, Mark Zuckerberg). These virtual assistants are going to be a large part of the future mobile phones, whether you like them or not. All major mobile operating systems have a digital personality baked into their software -- Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Now -- and they all generally do the same thing. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana can all schedule appointments, set reminders, look things up on the internet, and few other simple tasks.

Google's app factory is going into overdrive, readying several new features that empower Google Now and the company's upcoming digital assistant. The new features are hinted at in the code of the latest beta version of the Google app, which now powers all of the company's search and artificial intelligence services on Android. From the Google assistant to more voice commands, your phone is about to get far more proactive and predictive at serving as your aide. These features will be necessary for features like Android Auto on your phone and the assistant features of Google Allo. While a few hints of the Google Assistant showed up in a previous build, there's a lot more to be found in version 6.2 of the Google app beta (coming to the Play Store or now on APK Mirror). It looks like a combination of ways you can tweak the type of information that you get and can search for.

With the creators of Siri offering up a new personal assistant that won't just tell you what pizza is but can order one for you, artificial intelligence is showing a huge leap forward. Viv is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform built by Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, the creators of the AI behind Apple's Siri, the most well-known digital assistant in the world. Siri is known for answering questions, like how old Harrison Ford is, and reminding you to buy milk on the way home. Earlier this week during an onstage demo at Disrupt NYC, Kittlaus showed off Viv. This created an online buzz about the assistant's ability to not just answer questions or fire up a timer on a smartphone, but to answer complex questions and to interact with third-party services as well as online businesses.

Siri made the iPhone more responsive with artificial intelligence, but now its founders want to put AI in every device you own. Dag Kittlaus, who cofounded Siri, left Apple five years ago, but now he's back with a new voice assistant named Viv that he predicts will change the way we interact with not just our phones, but our home appliances, cars, and more. Viv has gotten a lot of hype for a product that hasn't shipped yet, but Kittlaus demoed Viv publicly for the first time at TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday. Right now, Viv is an iOS app, though it won't always be. You open the app and ask the assistant questions or issue commands.

Apple has agreed to pay $24.9 million to a patent holding company to resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit accusing Siri of infringing one of its patents. Apple will pay the money to Marathon Patent Group, the parent company of Texas firm Dynamic Advances, which held an exclusive license to a 2007 patent covering natural language user interfaces for enterprise databases. Marathon reported the settlement in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday. On Wednesday, in response to the settlement, Magistrate Judge David Peebles of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit against Apple filed by Dynamic Advances and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where the natural language technology was created. A trial had been scheduled to begin early next month in Syracuse, New York.