Cortana app for Android recently got updated in Play Store with few new improvements. Microsoft is bringing back'Hey Cortana' and you now have easier access to the voice button. Microsoft has released an update for Outlook Groups on Windows Phone. Unlike the last update, which was a major one, this one only adds bug fixes and performance improvements. Microsoft has just made it slightly easier for users to buy a new Surface device.

Everyone's obsessed with "conversation as a platform," or the idea that you should be able to interact with a service with natural language, spoken or written, instead of in the traditional click-an-icon way you'd interact with a computer. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and a slew of startups all rushing to find new ways to make it easier for users to connect to all the services they need through a single interface. Just this week, The Information reported that Apple plans to open up its virtual assistant, Siri, to third-party developers who want to integrate their services. We've entered the age of bots. Evernote founder and partner at VC firm General Catalyst, Phil Libin, believes that bots are the most exciting tech he's seen since the iPhone and that they'll rewrite the tech space like apps did in 2008.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) reminds us of many Hollywood movies, like The Terminator, The Matrix etc, in which machines surpass ability and smartness of human beings to perform incredible acts. With significant advancement in technology, it is now actually possible to empower a machine with AI by using a few programming techniques and database management system. But AI is no restricted to machines and robotics only, and is now seen as the next frontier of mobile devices too. Cortana, Siri and Google Now have already shown us how AI can make a difference in digital world to make human lives better. They behave as personal assistants to advise and suggest a user, like reminding birthdays of loved ones, an important meeting, a major event and many more.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry. The idea of talking conversationally to computers has been a long time in the works. Science fiction is so often a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it provides a vision for humans to chase after with technological innovation. For those of us who have watched voice-based computer interactions evolve, we have seen it go through many manifestations as it grew up. We now find ourselves in a world where using voice to interface with a computer is commonplace on a regular basis for the masses.

Part of Microsoft Accelerator's batch 3 of startups, DefinedCrowd is filling a niche in the big data and machine learning community, providing near-real-time feeds of rich language data, checked by actual well-informed humans all over the world. The need comes from the Catch-22 that often arrests deep data analysis, in that you have to understand the data to analyze it, but you must analyze it to understand it. The vast landscape of the spoken and written word and its big data counterpart in natural language processing is especially troublesome in this way. "In the artificial intelligence space, to develop virtual assistants like Cortana, or Apple's Siri and things like that, you need large amounts of voice recordings, you need transcriptions of those voices, you need intents and empathy labeling of those voices," said Daniela Braga, co-founder and chief scientist, in an interview with TechCrunch. "The crowd input provides the extra refinement of the data that basically no machine can do."

Marketing in a post–digital world was a major theme of the 2016 Forrester Research Marketing Forum held in New York recently. At the event, analyst Carl Doty defined the post–digital world as one in which digital is embedded in our daily lives. In that context, he described the evolution of marketing: pre-digital marketing meant using mass media in a one-to-many approach; digital marketing was about data-driven, one-to-one personalization; and post–digital marketing means one-to-moment marketing. One-to-moment marketing has been on the agenda of major brands and thought leaders for the past few years. Forrester's Julie Ask opened the conversation about one-to-moment marketing in 2014 when she urged brands to think of mobile marketing as an opportunity to create content that matters to consumers based on the context of their moment.

The Daily News reports that Gleeson had dropped and lost her phone while tending to Giana, so she yelled out for Siri to call an ambulance, remembering Siri's new voice-activated capability. While Siri dialed the number, Gleeson was able to perform CPR.

The stage is set for the coming battle between the big five tech giants: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon (wait, make that four tech giants and one really tech savvy retailer). All are now heavily investing in AI. All now offer personal AI assistants poised to make your life easier. One of the most recent announcements is from Google. The company launched Google Assistant, which is an integral part of the new Google Home device and Allo (its new messaging app).

Microsoft is releasing a new Xbox One update for its preview members today, and it includes access to Cortana for the first time. While Microsoft had originally planned to introduce Cortana for Xbox One last year, the company delayed the digital assistant integration to include it with the Anniversary Update to the console. Cortana will appear in the Xbox One dashboard, and you'll be able to access the voice assistant through the Kinect sensor or a headset. As a result, Microsoft is altering the way you activate Xbox voice commands to just "Hey Cortana." Cortana integration will be available in the US, UK, Italy, Germany, and Spain initially, and you'll be able to use the digital assistant to launch parties, see what friends are playing, and do basic tasks.

Facebook is known for a variety of mantras embedded in its culture, often spelled out on signs at its offices or recited by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives: "Code wins arguments," "Move fast and break things," or "Done is better than perfect." A sign on the wall at the company's New York office perfectly sums up the approach Yann LeCun brings to his leadership of Facebook's nascent efforts in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning: "Always be Open." Artificial intelligence has become a vital part of scaling Facebook. It's already being used to recognize the faces of your friends in photographs, and curate your newsfeed. DeepText, an engine for reading text that was unveiled last week, can understand "with near-human accuracy" the content in thousands of posts per second, in more than 20 different languages. Soon, the text will be translated into a dozen different languages, automatically. Facebook is working on recognizing your voice and identifying people inside of videos so that you can fast forward to the moment when your friend walks into view. Facebook wants to dominate in AI and machine learning, just as it already does in social networking and instant messaging.