We always knew Cortana was heading to Xbox One -- it was part of the strategy for the digital assistant as far back as 2013. But Microsoft used its E3 2016 press conference to confirm that Cortana is poised to arrive with a host of updates, including a number of changes to community services with the addition of clubs and new game matchmaking. When Cortana lands it will replace the traditional voice commands that Xbox gamers are able to use. So instead of just loudly saying "Xbox" to wake up the Kinect's voice recognition, you'll be able to say "Hey Cortana". I saw a quick demonstration of an early build of the Xbox version of Cortana at E3 2016.

At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco this week, Apple suggested that it was more than willing to compete toe-to-toe against Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in the artificial intelligence (A.I.) arena. As those rivals build increasingly sophisticated bots that can respond to users' natural-language commands, Apple has opened its own digital assistant, Siri, to third-party developers. If things pan out as the company expects, Siri will rapidly add more functionality, essentially becoming a butler for a growing collection of tasks. And that's just the first of what will surely be many A.I.-related initiatives on Apple's part. But how can Apple reconcile its need for personal data--the fuel of an effective A.I. platform--with its rigorous user privacy stance?

The competition among Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Alexa, and Facebook's M (still in its early stages), has kept the spotlight on virtual assistants for the last couple of years. The assistants and the AI technologies that power them have piqued the interest of venture capitalists as well. "Having written a bad version of ELIZA [an early-stage natural language processing program] as one of my earliest programs, I have been excited about the prospect of conversing with machines for a long time. So I will be watching this development closely…" Union Square Ventures' Albert Wenger wrote in his blog. We've identified 21 startups working in the virtual assistant space or providing underlying technology to power digital assistants that either received either Series B, Series A, or seed/angel funds since 2015.

Apple Inc.'s new artificial-intelligence capabilities may help it protect its software and services businesses from incursions by Alphabet Inc.'s Google -- and cut the internet giant out of lucrative search roles on its devices. At Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference this week, the company unveiled a crop of new AI-powered features: Its Siri voice-based digital assistant expanded from iPhones and iPads to its Mac laptop and desktop computers; natural-language processing brought new automated emoji creation to the iPhone maker's iMessage service; and image-recognition will give its gadgets the ability to automatically understand and organize photos stored on them. The capabilities are, in part, a natural riposte to recent AI-infused Google offerings, such as a mobile keyboard, a popular picture-organizing app named Photos, and a planned digital assistant that will live inside a new mobile messaging system called Allo. The Gboard keyboard was specifically designed for iPhones and is a way for Google to get its search service used in new ways on those devices. The Photos app works on iOS devices and Google's own Android mobile operating system and represents a twist on Google's search capabilities.

In a blog post, Amy Nicholson, technical evangelist at Microsoft, explains how she used the Cortana Intelligence Gallery, together with Azure ML Studio, to help her start building her own ML (machine learning) models "as well as my knowledge about this space." Azure ML is a fully managed cloud service on Microsoft Azure that helps you easily build, deploy and share predictive analytics solutions, Nicholson writes. All of this in a simple drag-and-drop interface to go from an idea to the deployment of a ML API in a matter of clicks." To learn more, visit the Cortana Intelligence and Machine Learning Blog.

For the last two years, the popular x.ai virtual personal assistant has been helping Google Calendar users manage their meetings. Today, x.ai is finally coming to Microsoft calendars, with support for Office 365 and Outlook.com, as the company moves closer to the release of its paid business edition later this year. "Microsoft pretty much owns the enterprise, and as we move towards the launch of our professional edition, this could not come at a better time. Getting market share and working with Microsoft somewhat rhymes," x.ai CEO and founder Dennis R. Mortensen says. Just copy "amy@x.ai" to your email, and "Amy Ingram," your personal AI assistant, will handle the annoying parts of finding a time that works for both parties.

That's the simple and iconic slogan Apple used during the second coming of Jobs, during his reinvention and revitalization of the company in the late '90s. Yes, there are second acts in American life. Jobs gave one to Apple, and it's still living it. But the world, of course, keeps changing, and computing changes, and Apple itself may need to think different. This year has been the year of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision.

Simonite goes on, "A new version of Apple's Photos app, coming this fall with a new version of Apple's mobile operating system, will use facial recognition to maintain virtual albums of snaps containing people you frequently photograph. It will also look at the contents of your photos, so you can search your collection using keywords such as'horses' or'mountains.' Federighi said those features are powered by deep learning, a technique that underpins significant recent progress in artificial intelligence. They are also playing catch-up with Google, which introduced a photos service with those same features over a year ago (see'Google Rolls Out New Automated Helpers'). But Federighi said that Apple didn't want its algorithms to spill data to Apple about the content of user photos. 'When it comes to performing advanced deep learning and intelligence of your data, we're doing it on your device, keeping your personal data under your control,' he said."

The founder and CEO of Bumble, Whitney Wolfe, said the new development will add another factor to people's choice to swipe. "For us, it's all about giving our users more fun and meaningful ways to connect," she told The Huffington Post. "Music has such convening power and we're excited to see what insights come from users connecting based on a shared love of music." But Bumble is also working on a feature that'll put the damper on that: users will soon be able to hide certain artists from the feed. If you're like us, you probably don't want your future significant other to know you sit alone in your room listening to Billy Joel for hours on end. But our own self-indulgence aside, this is pretty disingenuous.

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. "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. "As data becomes more and more available, it typically has required quite a bit of labor to ensure that your CRM system stays up to date," Green explained.