One of the ultimate aims of artificial intelligence is to create machines we can chat to. A computer program that can be trusted with mundane tasks - booking our holiday, reminding us of dentist appointments and offering useful advice about where to eat - but also one that can discuss the weather and answer offbeat questions. Alan Turing, one of the first computer scientists to think about artificial intelligence, devised a test to judge whether a machine was "thinking". He suggested that if, after a typewritten conversation, a human was fooled into believing they had talked to another person rather than a computer program, the AI would be judged to have passed. These days we chat to machines on a regular basis via our smart devices.

Predicting the future shape of technology is a fool's game. If you believed the forecasts of future-gazers when I was growing up, we would all be taking holidays on the moon, consuming our meals in tablet form and enjoying a 10-hour working week by now. And even very recent predictions seem to be going awry. Figures last week from Apple showed iPad sales slowing, and growth in the overall tablet market is looking less than spectacular, so the idea that the conventional desktop PC is in its death throes now seems to be a bit oversold. Nevertheless, Radio 4's The World At One is taking the brave step of trying to forecast the hot technology trends that we all need to know about.

"I don't know what you mean - how about a web search for it?" If you want the latest football scores, to add meetings to your calendar or launch an app, today's virtual assistants are relatively good at understanding your voice and doing what's asked. But try to have the type of natural conversation seen in sci-fi movies featuring artificial intelligence systems - from HAL in 2001 to the sultry-voiced operating system Samantha in Spike Jonze's Her - and you'll find your device about as smart as a waterproof teabag. "Google and Apple are painfully aware that their systems are not getting better fast enough because right now Siri and Google Now and the other personal assistant type applications are all programmed by hand," says Steve Young, professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge. "If you speak to Siri about baseball it seems relatively intelligent, but if you ask it something much less common it doesn't really do anything except for a web search. "That's an indication that the programmers have been busy trying to anticipate what people want to ask about baseball but haven't thought about people who ask about, for example, GPU chips because you don't get many queries about that." Microsoft doesn't yet have a virtual assistant on its Windows Phone platform, but the company is experimenting with AI in lifts and reception desks at its headquarters. Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft's research unit, believes part of the solution involves allowing computers to look beyond questions posed. "The ability of a system to understand more broadly what the overall context of a communication is turns out to be very important," he told the BBC. "There are some critical signals in context.

Someone tried to mess around with the FaceUnlock application code from the Android SDK, and stumbled upon this code, which seems to include answers, as if given by a personal assistant or such. We've heard some rumors a few months back that Google may be working on a personal assistant as part of their Google X projects, and they've been doing this for years. These rumors came from someone who claimed he was involved with Google X, and he wanted to give a hint about what they've been working on: This is in total violation of the NDA, but I don't care anymore. The central focus of Google X for the past few years has been a highly advanced artificial intelligence robot that leverages the underlying technology of many popular Google programs. As of October (the last time I was around the project), the artificial intelligence had passed the Turing Test 93% of the time via an hour long IM style conversation. IM was chosen to isolate the AI from the speech synthesizer and physical packaging of the robot.

As consumers, we're familiar with -- if not yet wholly invested in -- the term "artificial intelligence," whether it's by way of self-driving cars or voice-enabled search like Siri and Amazon's Alexa. Artificial intelligence is on course to drastically change the enterprise, with big implications for productivity, and possibly even larger ramifications for the economy. Business intelligence is providing companies with an overabundance of data, but it's AI that's emerging to make this data actionable by giving executives and employees useful insights that are relevant to their specific roles and what they need to accomplish on any given day. To name just a few implications of how business will change with AI, today's workforce will be empowered to take on new approaches with time management, teamwork and collaboration, client service, and business forecasting. For example, instead of just assessing raw data, artificial intelligence can take into account historical patterns and the current context of an employee's role, the nature of the business within which they work, and market dynamics.

It's not the level design or even the gameplay, which are both compelling enough. As a long-time gamer who has fond memories of playing Ico quite a few years ago and then beating the spiritual successor to that release called Shadow of the Colossus in 2005 (all created by designer Fumito Ueda and his team with a focus on forming an emotional bond), I've kept up on this latest project. The Last Guardian features a young boy climbing around on castles and coaxing a giant dragon-like creature named Trico into helping him escape. The interchange between the boy and the creature is what held my attention. It serves as a good lesson in how to make AI in a chatbot, a digital assistant or within an app or any piece of software.

"Wear that blue-colored dress today, it matches your new shoes." "Go to Tahiti on vacation, there is a good price now for tickets for this destination." All of these pieces of advice and more come from AI assistants. A wide range of these assistants have emerged to make our lives better: big ones like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and SoundHound and multiple startups that are trying to conquer the market. Alterrа, for example, will help you choose the country for your next vacation.

Today, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible with artificial intelligence (A.I.) and how individuals will interact with its various forms. Every single aspect of our society -- from cars to houses to products to services -- will be reimagined and redesigned to incorporate A.I. A child born in the year 2030 will not comprehend why his or her parents once had to manually turn on the lights in the living room. In the future, the smart home will seamlessly know the needs, wants, and habits of the individuals who live in the home prior to them taking an action. Before we arrive at this future, it is helpful to take a step back and reimagine how we design cars, houses, products, and services. We are just beginning to see glimpses of this future with the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart voice assistants.

I recently spent a few days with my family at a ski lodge in the Sierras. While we were there, we noticed a young French couple who spent the vast majority of their time sitting by the fire, staring at a tiny Android tablet, flipping through a guidebook, and making notes in a paper calendar. For two or three days, while we were out skiing through the sublimely silent woods, learning how to snowboard on the bunny slope, and sitting in the hot tub underneath the misty evening skies, these two sad, beautiful foreigners were sitting in the lodge, trying to plan their trip. A similar experience motivated Travis Katz to create Gogobot, a social travel recommendation engine that helps you plan your trip quickly and efficiently by using the expertise of your Facebook and Twitter networks. Katz, while working for MySpace in London a few years ago, spent so much time researching and planning European trips that he wound up missing many of the actual trips.

Across Silicon Valley, technology companies are scrambling to make their software smarter with the help of artificial intelligence. Both Apple and Google have made significant improvements to their virtual assistants, Siri and Google Now, that help them better understand what a user might need before he or she asks. Meanwhile, Facebook has unveiled plans to create its own intelligent chat bot that can perform tasks on your behalf. As of this week, Apple has more firepower in the AI department. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has purchased Emotient, a company that uses artificial intelligence to interpret a person's emotions, The Wall Street Journal first reported Thursday.