Falling in love with an intelligent computer operating system may become a thing of the present with the new Gatebox virtual home robot. The Gatebox robot is a glass tube in which a character is projected. It contains a microphone and camera for interaction. In addition to this companionship component, the Gatebox robot can also be connected to the user's home network to automate household appliances. The robot also has warmth, moisture, and light sensors.

The creative mind has a lot to gain from Artificial Intelligence and can use it as the pathway for their success. A creative mind is definitely an attribute that most entrepreneurs possess and their thoughts and ideas can often lead to producing many different forms of successful businesses. At the same time there is so much data that the human mind has to process that revolves around their creativity, that much of it can become lost in the transition of taking an idea and putting it into reality. With the use of artificial intelligence to relay what is present in the creative mind it opens up the way of the future for doing business and expanding upon creativity to beyond whatever could be imagined. In today's world of business within utilizing the resources of A.I., brands have to rely on limited resources to be able to identify what the consumer wants from them.

Artificial intelligence (AI) had a coming out party of sorts in 2016. Even though it has been in development for decades, this year, with the perfect combination of cheap computing power and access to increasing amounts of data, it seems AI's time has come. Its first foray in business has been directed at making salespeople more efficient at every level of the sales workflow. If you think about it, it makes sense to start with the part of the company that drives revenue. Certainly the vendors recognize that, says Alan Lepofsky, an analyst at Constellation Research, who is working on the impact of AI on work.

This year's news about what artificial intelligence (AI) can do in the arts has been both exciting and scary. Neural networks have learnt to paint like masters and compose sophisticated music. Those of us in creative endeavours might be as endangered by technological advances as blue-collar workers are often said to be - though we are protected by certain limitations that technology is never likely to overcome. Last summer, a team of Russian developers released Prisma, a mobile app based on the work of some German AI researchers. The neural network behind it could redraw an image using techniques it had learnt from studying the oeuvre of a number of painters, including Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch. The end product was impressive: Prisma could reproduce brushstrokes and palettes, using only a photo for guidance, almost the way a human painter could have.

The first step away from search engines and towards intelligent assistants was marked by Google's launch in 2012 of Google Now, which offered "information that you need throughout your day, before you even ask". It tried to predict what users might want – such as weather reports, sports results or public transport updates – and this information would appear on your phone without the need to type anything into a search bar. By 2016 this had evolved into Google Assistant, capable of having a two-way dialogue with the user, and designed with wearable technologies in mind. You can ask it to remember things (such as codes or passwords) and it learns to recognise things you do regularly so it can offer relevant suggestions. It can also look at what is on your phone screen to get'context' for what you are doing – for example if you are discussing going to a rock-climbing centre with a friend, it can show you prices and directions.

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This year's news about what artificial intelligence can do in the arts has been both exciting and scary. Neural networks have learned to paint like masters and compose sophisticated music. Those of us in creative endeavors might be as endangered by technological advances as blue-collar workers are often said to be--though we are protected by certain limitations that technology is never likely to overcome. Last summer, a team of Russian developers released Prisma, a mobile app based on the work of some German artificial intelligence researchers. The neural network behind it could redraw an image using techniques it had learned from studying the oeuvre of a number of painters, including Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch. The end product was impressive: Prisma could reproduce brushstrokes and palettes, using only a photo for guidance, almost the way a human painter could have.

In 2005, Atlanta-based voiceover artist Susan Bennett recorded hundreds of hours of audio for a text-to-speech company. Six years later, on 4 October 2011, she quickly learned that those recordings had been licensed by Apple for the iPhone 4S's built-in personal assistant, Siri. Overnight, Susan's voice became globally recognised, whether she liked it or not. In this week's episode of Chips with Everything, Matt Shore speaks to Susan about her experiences of being thrust into the world of Siri and how her life has changed since that fateful day. Follow us on Twitter: @mattshore and @guardianaudio Tell us how technology affects you.

And how can they each illuminate the nature of mind and self? These were some of the questions on Siri Hustvedt's mind as she began her new book of essays, A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women. Hustvedt herself has an omnivorous professional history that blends the two worlds in unconventional ways. She is an essayist, poet, and novelist (best known for her recent novel The Blazing World), an English literature PhD by training, and lectures on psychiatry at the Weill Medical School of Cornell. In her essays, Hustvedt uses this eclectic expertise to jump freely from the arts to empirical science and back again.

While we think of them as the latest thing in tech, conversational interfaces have been around for quite some time. From Cleverbot and Smarter Child to labyrinthine phone trees ("say REPRESENTATIVE"), we have been trying for years to build technology that mimics how we interact with humans. Recent advances have positioned these tools for substantial growth and brought them back to the foreground of the conversation on the future of technology. Conversational interfaces for both speech and text have risen to prominence thanks to virtual assistants or "chatbots," such as Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. Also, text-based chatbots, or messaging platforms such as Slack and Facebook Messenger, have seen a huge spike in utilization.