Microsoft is joining Google and Amazon in the race for your home. This week, at an event in China, the venerable tech giant trumpeted the arrival of Project Evo, a sweeping plan to build hardware devices that work a lot like Google Home or the Amazon Echo. But this race is much bigger than some gadgets that sit on your coffee table. The prize is more than just the best home digital assistant. The biggest spoils go to the company that rides its assistant to artificial brains that are far smarter--and creates a market for using these brains to do just about anything. OpenAI Joins Microsoft on the Cloud's Next Big Front: Chips Intel Looks to a New Chip to Power the Coming Age of AI Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Artificial Intelligence Just Broke Steve Jobs' Wall of Secrecy Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all racing to build systems that recognize and truly understand natural language--how you and I talk.

Meet Jill Watson, a first-time teaching assistant at Georgia Tech assigned to moderate an online forum for a computer science class. Jill was 1 of 9 TAs assigned to help answer questions about coursework and projects from the 300 students enrolled in the advanced course. During the first few weeks in January, Jill really struggled. This was Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence, after all, a course with the goal to "build AI agents capable of human-level intelligence and gain insights into human cognition." It was also a requirement for graduate students to earn their master's degree.

Firmly rooted in the realm of science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) has often felt external – something happening out there. In reality, AI is a huge part of our everyday lives. We just don't recognize it.Bank alerts of suspected fraudulent charges, smartphone notifications to exercise, Siri or Cortana's ability to recognize voices – are all examples of AI. "Artificial intelligence is basically where machines make sense, learn, interface with the external world, without human beings having to specifically program it," said Nidhi Chappell, director of machine learning at Intel. AI improves lives in many other areas too. By measuring biometrics in sports, data can help measure how an athlete's playing time impacts injury likelihood.

Cognitive computing is rapidly infusing every aspect of our lives. As 2017 approaches, the cognitive revolution--riding on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data science -- is coming home to roost more rapidly than many realize. Here are my predictions for the many ways in which you may encounter cognitive technology. Most e-commerce applications now include in-line chatbots that pop out automatically and/or at your request to answer your questions, recommend products for you to purchase, and otherwise make your customer experience more seamless and satisfying. Behind the natural-language conversational interface are cognitive algorithms that are built and tuned by data scientists through real-world experiments, A/B tests, machine learning, and predictive analytics assets in line to merchants' applications.

Intel and Microsoft are working on technology allowing you to shout out commands to Cortana or activate a Windows 10 PC from sleep mode without being all that close to it. The chipmaker is working with Microsoft to add "far-field speech recognition" technology, where one can shout out Cortana commands to a Windows PC from longer distances. "Soon, you'll be able to speak to your PC from a distance and access all of your information on the device and in the cloud," Navin Shenoy is senior vice president and general manager for the Client Computing Group for Intel, said in a blog entry this week. Also, users will also be able to use Cortana to start a PC from standby. Users will have to say, "Hey Cortana."

Microsoft's slow advance into the mobile territory held by rivals Apple and Google continues this week with updates and expanded availability of a key mobile application that runs on the opposition's platforms. As iOS and Android circle the wagons to make sure that no other OS platforms can become established in the mobile space, Microsoft is playing a slightly longer game with a different target. Although Windows 10 Mobile is a great environment (and one that I personally enjoy) it does not have the market share or volume of mobile users that are needed to be self-sustaining. Which is why Microsoft is not only focusing on cloud-based services, but also ensuring they are usable on both iOS and Android as well as Windows 10. A quick glance at the app stores shows the prominence of Outlook, the utility of Outlook365, and the quiet magic of OneNote all riding high.

With marketing becoming taking a central role in many companies, CMOs are forced to think more strategic. While they wade through the thousands of martech and adtech software out there, they must also align with the board and line of business heads to ensure that their marketing strategies meet corporate goals. It has ushered a new interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help CMOs succeed. Such needs as created a frenzy among vendors to build the ultimate AI. Amazon, for example, recently announced three new AI tools – Lex, Polly, and Rekognition -- drawing on the character of the company's personal AI assistant Alexa. Together, they will help developers to create apps that consumers can have easy conversations with, seamlessly turn speech to text and vice versa, and allow a product to recognize face and objects (and identify who it is talking to).

When Amazon first coined the strapline "Ask Alexa" for its virtual assistant, it couldn't have predicted the X-rated nature of some of the requests. "She" may boast an encyclopaedic knowledge, but research by consumer behaviour analysts Canvas8 reveals that some users are more interested in a virtual hook-up than fact finding. And she's not the only target: the equally smooth voice of Microsoft's Cortana is getting customers just as hot under the collar apparently. From perma-smiling avatars in traditionally female support roles, to hyper-sexualised "fembots" pandering to male fantasies, the female form is everywhere in techno-world - attractive, servile and at your command. A little more conservative, but just as eager to please, is virtual personal assistant Amy Ingram, the brainchild of New York start-up X.ai.

Microsoft is finally making its Cortana virtual assistant available through Android and iOS apps in the UK. The Cortana iOS and Android apps launched in the US and China exactly one year ago, but the UK version features a new simplified look and feel for the apps. The idea of the app is to extend the use of Cortana from Windows 10 PCs to smartphones, and as Microsoft has massively scaled back its plans to make smartphones running Windows Phone, that means trying to persuade iOS and Android users to get on board. Both those operating systems already have their own voice-powered digital assistants. Users of the Cortana app can, for example, set a reminder on their PC and get it on their mobile phone, or receive missed call alerts on a Windows 10 PC and get Cortana send a text back letting the caller know you'll call them later.

Amazon has partnered with Irvine CA based audio and voice solutions company Conexant Systems to accelerate the adoption of smart home appliances. It has released an Alexa Voice Service (AVS) approved AudioSmart 2-mic Development Kit designed for smart home applications. The kit consists of Conexant's AudioSmart CX20921 hands-free voice input processor, and Alexa wake word technology. The AudioSmart 2-mic development kit for Amazon AVS will allow product developers to build voice enabled products with Alexa. It has been designed to be integrated into any AVS system prototype based on the Raspberry Pi. This is intended to reduce the time needed for prototyping and engineering new digital assistant devices from over six months to a couple of weeks.