I'm starting to enjoy talking to computers. I don't use speech-to-text all that much because I'm so keyboard-oriented, but I love being able to run a search by voice or ask for last night's baseball scores. Siri works well for this, though I'm now using Android and am thus in the hands of Google Now, which keeps asking me to re-train it by speaking'OK Google' over and over again. Despite this annoyance, a day rarely passes that I don't talk to Google Now. Which raises an interesting question.

In a story June 29 about Microsoft's Windows 10, The Associated Press misspelled the name of a woman who sued Microsoft in small claims court. She is Teri Goldstein, not Terri. The story also provided an incorrect age for Goldstein. She declined to give her age for publication. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Microsoft has a birthday present for Windows 10 users: more capabilities for its Cortana digital assistant and new ways to ditch passwords.

Talking to WIRED before his speech at WIRED Health, Kyu Rhee, IBM's chief health officer, took from his pocket one of the iconic pieces of medical equipment: the stethoscope. The stethoscope is celebrating its 200th anniversary – the first, monaural version was created by the French doctor René Laennec. Despite technical advances – and the rise of other non-invasive techniques for internal examination – the stethoscope still means "doctor": according to a 2012 research paper, carrying a stethoscope makes a practitioner seem more trustworthy than any other piece of medical equipment. "It's amazing how medicine in some ways still leverages this piece of technology," said Rhee. "But I believe that in the next 200 years a cognitive system like Watson will be a part of every healthcare decision, for every stakeholder." IBM Watson's cognitive approach to computing absorbs data – structured and unstructured – and produces answers.

She's smart, resourceful, and roughly the same size as two Campbell's soup cans stacked on top of one another. Her name's Alexa, and unless you've been hiding under a technology- averse rock for the past several months, you've probably heard of her. The Amazon Echo packs a technological maze of wires, motherboards, speakers, and LED's into a 9 x 3 cylindrical frame. It's impressively accurate voice recognition technology is the perfect key to tie your smart home together (for a detailed teardown of an Echo, check out this article from I Fix It) Here at Inspire Energy, we've road tested the Amazon Echo since early April of this year. Here are three important set -ups you'll want to nail on your first day of ownership so that you can get the most out of Alexa right from the get go.

Ask Apple's Siri digital assistant if she's evil, and she'll respond curtly, "Not really." Repeat a famous line from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," in which a computer on a spaceship kills nearly all the human crew, and Siri groans. And who can blame her? We humans have a morbid fascination with machines rising up to wipe us out or to enslave us as cocooned, flesh-and-blood battery packs. You can see that vision of the future streaming over Netflix whenever you want.

It's your nighttime routine: You drop your phone onto the nightstand charging pad, and it asks about your day. You tell it, talking to the virtual personal assistant just like you'd talk to a friend. Your phone's artificial intelligence knows you almost as well as you know yourself (maybe even better). So when it suggests ways to get through tomorrow's calendar, you trust its advice. AI is practically everywhere, and getting smarter all the time.

Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) artificial intelligence Alexa can now place orders on Amazon, making it even easier for shoppers to use the service with more frequency. Alexa is the digital voice assistant inside the company's Echo Bluetooth speakers. It previously could only re-order items that had already been purchased, but now it can order anything that is available to Amazon Prime members, with some exceptions. Users simply ask Alexa for a product available with Prime, she makes a suggestion, reports the price and a simple "yes" buys it. There are millions of items now available for ordering through Alexa and quite a few that are not, including Amazon Fresh, Amazon Prime Pantry and Amazon Prime Now items.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern.

Many aspects of my life are neat and organized. My computer is not one of them. I rarely purge my system of old files and photos. I forget to uninstall software I don't need anymore. My desktop is a mess of thumbnails and documents.

The bot revolution is happening fast for Facebook. After launching third-party bots in April offering everything from forecasts to your boarding pass, the social network says there are now more than 11,000 bots active on Facebook. To celebrate, Facebook is adding a bunch of new features that could show up on your favorite bots soon--if developers enable them, that is. One big problem with bots is they feel a little antiquated. Many of them will only respond to certain commands, which can make the whole experience kind of tedious. You try a certain command.