The most notable addition here is full Cortana integration. The Xbox One has been notorious for the voice commands Microsoft tried to push with the Kinect, but the company is promising a less strict, more fluid and conversational experience with Cortana. Now, to turn on your console, you'll say "Hey Cortana, Xbox On." All of those same Xbox commands that previously were supported will still work, but you'll need to say "hey Cortana" to get the assistant's attention first and then tell it what you want to do. Probably more significant is how Cortana's intelligence comes into play when using voice commands.

Late Night host Seth Meyers sits down with USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham to talk tech--why Facebook is funnier than Twitter, his thoughts on drones and hyperloops, his home app of choice and why he won't buy the Amazon Echo. "I couldn't live without my iPhone, but if I have to hit a reply, I'm so much happier having a Blackberry," says Meyers in a #TalkingTech interview here. He likes iPhone for surfing and quick replies, but the physical keyboard of the BlackBerry for writing jokes and longer e-mail replies. The host of NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers (Monday through Friday, 12:35 AM) regularly turns to tech in his monologues, where gadgets, apps and websites are often just as relevant as the day's headlines. He recently took on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the segment "Hillary Clin-Tron Tech Genius," for not being as tech savvy as he would have liked, roasting her for such sins as admitting that she didn't know how to charge an Apple iPad or operate the fax (yes, fax) machine. The former Saturday Night Live troupe player and writer describes himself as "pretty good for a 42-year-old, and pretty terrible for an 18-year-old.

Microsoft has announced a new summer update for the Xbox One console, which will include support for the company's digital personal assistant, Cortana, and will more closely align the console with Windows 10 PCs. A more unified online store will offer both PC and console titles, and Xbox One will also be able to support some Windows apps. Microsoft is calling the Xbox One version of Cortana a "personal gaming assistant". As on PC and smartphone, she is able to learn your current whereabouts and where your key locations are, so you'll be able to ask it, while you're playing a game at home, how long it'll take you to get to work. Any information you request from Cortana will be displayed in a panel at the side of the main game screen.

A startup founded by a former top boss at Nasa has emerged from so-called stealth mode with technology that claims to beat Apple, Google and Microsoft's voice recognition technology. Dan Goldin, who spent nearly all of the 1990s leading Nasa, has revealed KnuEdge, a machine learning company that already boasts Fortune 500 clients and 100m in private funding despite its under the radar nature for the last decade. "We are not about incremental technology. Our mission is fundamental transformation," said Goldin "We were swinging for the fences from the very beginning, with intent to create next-generation technologies that will in essence alter how humans interact with machines, and enable next-generation computing capabilities ranging from signal processing to machine learning." The US-based firm has revealed its first product, KnuVerse, which it claims is a military-grade voice recognition and authentication technology, and believes it is more powerful than the most advanced but early stage voice recognition used in services such as Apple's Siri and Google's Home and Alexa.

If she seems a little robotic, well, that's because she's actually an artificially intelligent entity living inside a software platform. From Alexa to Viv, the world is now full of voice-enabled cloud-connected assistants. But Amelia is more than merely a series of speech-savvy algorithms -- she's Siri with a doctorate in psychology. Thanks to advances in semantic analysis, Amelia can step you all the way through a sophisticated business process, like purchasing insurance. By analyzing the language you use and your tone of voice, Amelia can also detect when you're unhappy and pass you immediately to a human.

Apple needs to change its attitude and approach to customer data, back away from the big data corner it has painted itself into, and use its upcoming World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) to lay out some sort of artificial intelligence vision. Amazon has Alexa and its Echo. Google has Home, Assistant and a bevy of other services. Meanwhile, Apple has its long-in-the-tooth Siri that reportedly will be opened up to third party developers. Over the last two years, Apple has dug its heels in on privacy, vilified ad models to some degree and knocked Silicon Valley rivals (read Facebook and Google) for using customers as the products and collecting too much information.

Good news for Microsoft Band 2 owners who pair their wearable with an Android device: you're now getting one of the last big features that, until now, has been exclusive to Windows Phone. Microsoft has updated its Health app, in turn enabling Cortana on the Band 2 and allowing users to issue voice commands. This update makes the Band 2 work with Android in just about every single way it does with Microsoft's own Windows Phone platform. With Cortana on the Band 2, users can interact with the voice assistant without needing to touch their phone, getting notifications for messages and calendar events. All users need to do is speak into the wearable's mic.

While the world has been fixated on following the soap opera of financial markets, a more profound and ubiquitous development has been taking place worldwide - the rapid development in artificial intelligence and the fourth industrial revolution, which we think will mark an endless wave of disruptions. We believe artificial intelligence (AI) is almost ready for wider adoption by businesses, in turn providing opportunities, but also risks for investors. With corporate longevity already on the decline - according to McKinsey, one in five listed companies in the US may not last beyond the next five years - the integration of AI into business applications will have significant investment implications in the years to come. Similar to how companies with no core assets could become leaders in their industries today, AI companies have the potential to become tomorrow's industry leaders. As noted by Mr Tom Goodwin of the French media group Havas, who would have imagined just a few years back that the world's largest taxi firm (Uber) would own no vehicles, the world's largest accommodation provider (Airbnb) would operate no rooms, while the world's most valuable media company (Facebook) would create no content?

After robots flood the work market, the only jobs left for real people will be those that require critical thinking and human-level care. Something like a teacher at a college, that could definitely never be outsourced to an machine, right? Ashok Goel, a professor in computing at Georgia Tech, implemented an artificial intelligence teaching assistant in the online Q&A forums for one of his courses last semester. Young academics busting their backs in hopes of one day snagging a TA job will be alarmed to learn that the A.I, named Jill, performed so well that most of the course's students couldn't tell her from the other eight human TAs who were performing the same duties. The A.I.'s full name was Jill Watson, built from the same IBM Watson platform that beat humans in Jeopardy!

Me: Will it rain in NYC next week? Bot: It will be cloudy later today in New York, NY. Thanks to high-profile launches by Facebook and Microsoft, public attention has been focused on dumb message bots that answer basic requests such as "What's the weather?" But if messaging is the new platform and conversation the new UI, we are going to need smarter bots. Not bots that only give you information, but bots that know about you and help you do important things.