Student developers at the Apple Worldwide Developer's conference say they're ready to bring Siri to the masses, and make the personal digital assistant more useful. SAN FRANCISCO - What are the greatest, state-of-the-art apps for Apple iPhones, iPads, TVs and the Watch? Apple this week handed out awards to 12 app makers who are stretching the boundaries in what the company calls its Design Awards. The nods are given to put a spotlight on the best and brightest in app world. We sat down with most of the winners for an extended podcast at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) here to talk about their apps, the state of the app world and their take on new app features that Apple introduced at WWDC.

Apple built its success on devices. Devices are what it does, and what it's done forever. Everything the company makes is expensive, immaculately designed, and completely finished inside and out. You don't buy an Apple product to tinker with it, you use it until Apple releases something better. This strategy has made Apple the most valuable company in the world. But even Apple must change, a point CEO Tim Cook made during the Worldwide Developers Conference this week.

Microsoft seems to be on an acquiring spree as the company on Friday said that it had acquired messaging app developer Wand Labs. "This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for'Conversation as a Platform', which Satya Nadella introduced at our Build 2016 conference in March," David Ku, corporate vice president at Information platform group divison at Mircosoft, said. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, who was on a India visit recently, had said his company was trying to teach computers the human language to make computing faster by using artificial intelligence assistants such as Cortana, a programme that runs on most Windows devices and gets tasks done by speech recognition. "We are going to bring in bots which will result in democratisation for developers who would look at reinventing apps for speech recognition via a virtual assistant that would make human lives easier," he had added. Ku further justified the acquisition and said: "Wand Labs' technology and talent will strengthen our position in the emerging era of conversational intelligence, where we bring together the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence -- connecting people to knowledge, information, services and other people in more relevant and natural ways. It builds on and extends the power of the Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere."

Logitech is inquiring if customers are interested in registering to participate in a special beta test to see how the company's Harmony remote pairs with Alexa to provide important feedback. Harmony users can start and stop activities via Alexa voice commands with the new integration plans and provide Logitech with feedback on how well it works together. Combining the functionality of the Harmony remote and Alexa's voice commands could soon mean you won't even have to lift a hand to complete various Activities, and that sounds like a pretty convenient future for all.

We propose a method for building an interpretable recommender system for personalizing online content and promotions. Historical data available for the system consists of customer features, provided content (promotions), and user responses. Unlike in a standard multi-class classification setting, misclassification costs depend on both recommended actions and customers. Our method transforms such a data set to a new set which can be used with standard interpretable multi-class classification algorithms. The transformation has the desirable property that minimizing the standard misclassification penalty in this new space is equivalent to minimizing the custom cost function.

You can now ask Siri to search for YouTube videos on your Apple TV. This new feature, which was highlighted onstage at this week's WWDC, was expected to roll out this summer. But it's available right now for all fourth-generation Apple TVs. SEE ALSO: Apple TV's biggest pain points are going to get solved with next tvOS Here's how to do it: Using the Siri remote, simply say "Search YouTube for Justin Bieber falls down" or "Show me E.T. as a charming '90s sitcom on YouTube" and Apple TV will enter your search commands into the YouTube app. You can search for specific videos, people, or channels.

Platforms like Apple HomeKit and IFTTT (If This Then That) help your Internet-connected devices talk to each other. Use these cloud services to build your own domestic surveillance state. Forget fishing for keys while holding a case of beer. Install this puck on the inside of your door and it unlocks the dead bolt as it senses you (well, your phone) approaching. It works with HomeKit now, so you can use your voice too: "Siri, open the door!"

You'd get a book that contained paragraphs with key words missing, replaced with hints as to what might fill the blanks. You and your friends would come up with silly words to complete the sentences, with predictably hilarious results. For this game, the same word belongs in all the blanks. See if you can figure out what the missing word is (here's the source if you can't resist peeking). The current software ecosystem allows only whole products to be commercialized - not functions or features....

SugarCRM has put AI at the core of its product plans and is working on a new intelligence service along with a Siri-like agent named Candace. Tapping the company's recent acquisitions of Stitch and Contastic, the new technology will be designed to help businesses spend less time entering data into their customer relationship management software and more time learning from and acting upon it. SugarCRM is scheduled to demonstrate the new capabilities Wednesday at its SugarCon conference in San Francisco. Nominate your analytics project today! "In the CRM space, we want people to focus on what they're good at: relating to others, such as customers and partners," Rich Green, SugarCRM's chief product officer, said in an interview last week.

Virtual assistant technology is rapidly spreading on smartphones and other devices, but there's a new player in the field that has caught the attention of Silicon Valley. Dag Kittlaus, one of the masterminds behind Siri, now the ubiquitous helper available on Apple products, is looking to push the boundaries of what a virtual assistant can do with his new product, dubbed "Viv" and powered by artificial intelligence. For eight months, a CNET team tested more than 40 smart home products in a first-of-its-kind "living laboratory." "So at its essence, most of the assistants that we use today do a few dozen things, so we want to open the system up and let developers build hundreds and thousands of times the number of capabilities," Kittlaus said. "So really it's an opening up of the system and letting the world teach it."