With the release of Google Allo last week, we've officially entered the era of the assistant. Every company that owns a major tech platform is now betting that assistants will be an important interface in the post-mobile world. You might think assistants today are trivial or stupid, and you wouldn't be wrong. They often don't understand what we say and can't hold real conversations yet. Mostly they're relegated to simple tasks like playing music, sending texts, or setting timers.

Machine Learning is rapidly becoming a required and critical component of engineering organizations across the tech industry. From movie recommendation algorithms to self-driving cars, it is clearly an exciting and compelling field. Companies are hiring armies of Machine Learning researchers to solve difficult problems like voice and object recognition. What does this all mean to the average software engineer? In many cases, extremely specialized knowledge is necessary to outperform existing state-of-the-art systems.

Microsoft wants to "democratize artificial intelligence" and bring AI to systems that everyone uses. So to reflect that desire, the company is shaking up its organization. The company is creating a new group, the AI and Research Group, by combining the existing Microsoft Research group with the Bing and Cortana product groups, along with the teams working on ambient computing (a world in which everything around us is computerized and connected and responsive to our presence), robotics, and the Information Platform Group (which covered both Bing advertising and natural user interfaces). Together, the new AI and Research Group will have some 5,000 engineers and computer scientists. It will be lead by 20-year Microsoft veteran Harry Shum, who was previously the Executive Vice President of Technology and Research.

Called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the group consists of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and IBM. Executives from four of the five founding members of the Partnership on AI (from left): Eric Horvitz of Microsoft, Francesca Rossi of IBM, Yann LeCun of Facebook and Mustafa Suleyman of Google's DeepMind. Executives from four of the five founding members of the Partnership on AI (from left): Eric Horvitz of Microsoft, Francesca Rossi of IBM, Yann LeCun of Facebook and Mustafa Suleyman of Google's DeepMind. But Banavar hopes the group's work will make its way into educational curricula around the world that will inspire the new generations of AI researchers.

On Thursday Amazon announced the Alexa Prize, a 1 million award for the creation of a conversational artificial intelligence that can talk to people "coherently and engagingly" for a third of an hour. To aid the endeavor, up to ten teams will get a 100,000 stipend from Amazon along with Alexa-enabled devices, free cloud computing and support from Amazon's Alexa team. The push comes as Amazon's digital assistant Alexa is coming to multiple platforms beyond its original home on Amazon's Echo speaker, and as artificial intelligence is anticipated to become the cutting edge of tech companies' interfaces with their customers. The Alexa Prize announcement comes the same day several of the world's largest tech companies announced the formation of a consortium aimed at fostering the promise of artificial intelligence.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it was reorganizing part of the company to better position itself as one of the significant players in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. The company has created a new organization that combines its research group, one of the largest in the technology industry, and a number of products that rely on artificial intelligence, including its Bing search engine and Cortana virtual assistant. The new artificial intelligence and research group at Microsoft will have more than 5,000 employees. Microsoft also said that one of its top executives, Qi Lu, has left the company to recuperate from a serious bicycling accident that occurred several months ago. Once he recovers, Mr. Lu will continue to act as an adviser to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, and Bill Gates, its co-founder, Mr. Nadella said in an email to company employees Thursday. The creation of a new group at Microsoft with a focus on artificial intelligence was already planned, but the departure of Mr. Lu -- a respected computer scientist who spent a decade at Yahoo -- affected the shape of the new organization.

Most of us will be familiar with Siri, the personal assistant that lives inside your iPhone, answering questions, checking the weather, and setting your morning alarms. Now imagine Siri on a whole other level. Those of you that have recently updated your Apple devices to iOS 10 might have noticed the bot features that have been integrated into the messaging application. Bots are more accessible than ever, and can be reached without having to go at all out of your way. In fact, you could be using them regularly without even knowing it.

Microsoft is doubling down on its efforts to create better AI, with the establishment of a dedicated research group of over 5,000 staff to make Cortana and its other products much smarter. The decision taken by Microsoft to form a department solely focused on AI is no surprise, given the recent announcement of its involvement in the newly formed Partnership on AI to benefit People and Society. The partnership – that also includes Google, Facebook, Amazon and IBM, among others – is an attempt to democratise AI technology for the good of humankind. However, this doesn't prevent Microsoft from going it alone to compete with Google Now, Siri and Alexa in the intelligent personal assistant game. In a statement, Microsoft said that the division of 5,000 staff will be led by Microsoft veteran Harry Shum, who has worked in research and Bing engineering within the company.

What's Google got up its sleeve? We'll find out Tuesday, Oct. 4, when the company is holding an event in San Francisco. Google is expected to use the event to show off new smartphones and other hardware, as well as offer more information about its Internet-connected speaker, a rival to Amazon's popular Echo device. While Google hasn't said exactly what's in store for the event, the rumor mill is flush with speculation. And the company often releases new hardware right about this time of year.

Amazon has launched a 2.5 million competition for teams of students to create an artificial intelligence charming enough that people can chat to it about celebrity gossip and sports. The'Alexa Prize' is named after the service that powers Amazon's voice-activated smart speaker, the Amazon Echo. The goal of the inaugural competition is to build a'socialbot' for Alexa that will converse with people about popular topics and news events. The team with the highest-performing socialbot will win a 500,000 prize, while there's a 1 million for the team's university if their socialbot can chat "coherently and engagingly" with humans for 20 minutes. Up to ten teams of students will also win a 100,000 award, Alexa-powered devices, free AWS services, and support from the Alexa team.