Advances in technology are setting the stage for financial institutions to explore use cases that take advantage of a consumer's most natural communication method ... the voice. It wasn't so long ago that we were amazed that we interact with an IVR to solve basic customer service issues or that we could type on a piece of glass to communicate with our mobile device. The problem was that most IVR systems didn't learn about our needs over time and typing and gesturing is really not the most efficient way to interact with a computer or device for the vastly most common uses most people have. Even for the most basic routines require far more physical and mental effort than what should be required in today's digital age. What if each time you needed to reach out to your bank (or any other business) the organization remembered your entire history of interactions (needs, behaviors, preferences, transaction patterns and timing, etc.), allowing it to have an intelligent'conversation' without going over often repeated steps?

You may not know it, but machine learning is all around you. When you type a query into a search engine, it's how the engine figures out which results to show you–and which ads. When you read your email, you don't see most of the spam because machine learning has filtered it out. Go to Amazon to buy a book or Netflix to watch a video, and a machine-learning system helpfully recommends some others you might like. Facebook uses machine learning to decide which updates to show you, and Twitter does the same for tweets.

Siri may be the first mainstream digital assistant, but it's still the butt of many jokes now that it's been bested by just about all of Apple's biggest competitors. Siri's intelligence and responsiveness often lags behind Amazon's Alexa or Google Now. And the competition shows no sign of giving up its lead. Google made a bunch of splashy AI-related announcements at its I/O conference last month. And Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos said at the Recode conference this week that there are more than 1,000 employees working on Alexa and the Echo speaker.

How much time do you waste looking for that one file, email or attachment? Maybe you remember when you last opened it, who you were with or where you worked on it, but not much else? Ask for what you want – by typing or speaking out loud – using natural language. REACHit for Cortana will find your photos, documents, and emails faster than you can, and with a lot less stress. We'd like to thank our Beta testers for helping make our app great!

Where else but the Code Conference can you expect to hear from the Tech industry's biggest players like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai? Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version gave the wrong year Amazon won Emmys for Transparent. Speaking to the Code conference here, Bezos, whose company has a hit on its hand with the Echo connected speaker, said, "it's hard to overstate how big of an impact this will have on society over the next 20 years. It doesn't mean phones are going to go away or that voice actions will replace screens. As long as people have eyes, they have screens."

On slide 133 of her much-anticipated annual Internet Trends report, venture capitalist Mary Meeker made a curious comparison. She put a graph of iPhone sales side-by-side with a sales estimate for the Echo, the newish wireless speaker and voice-activated personal assistant from Amazon. That juxtaposition might seem strange, but Meeker was making a point. Sales of the iPhone have been slowing, and according to Meeker's projections, they'll go into decline by the end of 2016. Right as this is happening, sales of the Amazon Echo are starting to take off. It's a sign that using voice as a way to command your tech is steadily gaining traction.

The technology behind Alexa, the voice inside Amazon's Echo speaker, could become Amazon's fourth business pillar, alongside retail marketplace, Amazon Prime, and Amazon Web Services. Amazon has more than 1,000 people working on artificial intelligence and third-party apps that people have built using the company's SDK, Bezos, the founder and CEO of the company, said at Recode's Code Conference Tuesday. During an interview with Walt Mossberg, he said the company licenses the technology to others so they can embed it in an app or device. There's also a program that allows companies to build apps that teaches Alexa new skills. Bezos called artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning intelligence "gigantic" and says it's probably difficult to "overstate the impact it will have on society over the next 20 years."

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes difficult tasks possible, such as sorting and recognising patterns in incredibly large data sets. The most challenging problems often have unexpected input and are often referred to as AI-compete or AI-difficult, implying the need for human-like computation. While some might think of AI as technology mostly used for complex visual tasks – or even as a far-fetched concept only found in science fiction – it's used in more ways than most people realise. That raises the question: could modern society get by without this fast-growing technology? Depending on the source, some claim AI has been around since ancient times, when the Greeks had myths about robots, and engineers from Egypt and China built automatons.

"[Artificial intelligence] is the most exciting thing going on right now -- it's the holy grail that anyone in computer science has been thinking about," Bill Gates said on stage at Vox Media's Code Conference on Wednesday. Speech recognition and computer vision have seen more progress in the last five years than ever before. But Melinda said that stats around women in computer science are troubling: Only 17% of computer science graduates today are women, down from a peak of 37%. "We ought to care more about women being in computer science," she said. "You need women participating in these things." If women aren't active in the space, it will influence the things that artificial intelligence research is conducted around and applied to, she reasoned.

SAY it out loud and the machines will know. Search engines are moving beyond the web and into the messy real world. Every call into or out of US prisons is recorded. It can be important to know what's being said, because some inmates use phones to conduct illegal business on the outside. But the recordings generate huge quantities of audio that are prohibitively expensive to monitor with human ears.