Microsoft's last version of Windows is finally here: Windows 10 is arguably the best version of the ubiquitous operating system. But the question is, should you upgrade for free immediately? Or will it be another Windows 8 moment? Windows 10 is a big step towards the Microsoft classic becoming an always-connected operating system for every device, not just PCs, which is continuously updated for free. It'll run traditional desktop Windows apps, like Windows 7.

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are capable of radically disrupting the way we search for and consume information on the Internet. The convergence of several trends and technologies has resulted in a new interface through which people will be able to interact with your business. This will have a dramatic impact -- if your long-term marketing/business plan doesn't account for IPAs, you may be in the same boat as those people who said they didn't need a website in the early 2000s. If we look to pre/early Internet, then the primary interface to most businesses was the humble phone. Over the phone you could speak to a business and find out what they had in stock, when they'd be open, whether they had space for your reservation, etc., and then you could go on to order products, ask for directions, or place reservations.

Asus has just unveiled what's likely to be the most talked about product at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, a cute talking robot for the home priced at US 599. Called Zenbo, Asus pitched it as a personal assistant that can help look after elderly relatives or read stories to the kids, but that might be selling it a bit short. The robot is about two feet high and rolls around on wheels, with a display that can show its animated face or be used for other things like making video calls and streaming movies. Asus Chairman Jonney Shih demonstrated Zenbo at a press conference in Taipei Monday, giving it voice commands and asking it questions is it rolled around the stage. "Hey Zenbo, is it true you can take pictures"?

Spanish AI personal assistant app Sherpa has raised 6.5 million in a Series A funding round from Alma Mundi Innvierte Fund FCRE and a number of private investors. The Bilbao-based startup creates an app billed as a Predictive Personal Assistant that searches for and presents content that it has learned the user likes. The company claims that it intends to take Google and Apple head on in the space for intelligent PA apps. It recently signed a deal with Samsung that will see its app included as standard on the tech giant's latest devices. The new funds from this Series A round will be used by Sherpa to bolster its distribution, it said.

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, now an Executive Editor at The Verge and Editor at Large of Recode. Fifteen years ago, when the time became ripe for post-PC devices that put a premium on integrating software and hardware, Apple was the best-positioned company to lead the charge -- and it did. The company's vertical integration, its attention to detail and innovation in both software and hardware, and its willingness to make big bets gave it an edge. And it used that edge to reel off its now-familiar string of game-changing products like the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, and the iPad. Now, the iPod is essentially gone, and the other products are in mature or maturing markets, with either pretty flat or dropping sales.

Amazon's Alexa personal assistant is super useful in the Echo and lot of fun to use. But if you don't have an Echo or can't buy one because you're outside of the US, it can be hard to appreciate Alexa's skill set. In light of this, Amazon has created a web app that lets you play with Alexa right in your browser. You can access the web app at echosim.io and it lets you ask Alexa all kinds of questions. What it doesn't let you experience is the always listening nature of the Echo device and its far field microphone array -- you have to click and hold a button on the site before you speak to it.

According to a new report from Business Insider, Apple is working on a new artificial intelligence system that will "wipe the floor" with all of its competitors. The major improvement to Siri is said to come from the company's acquisition of VocalIQ, a UK-based start-up that created artificial-intelligence software that helps computers and people speak to each other in a more natural dialogue. Before getting acquired, VocalIQ tested their technology against Siri, Google Now, and Cortana. With a question like "Find a nearby Chinese restaurant with open parking and WiFi that's kid-friendly" VocalIQ had a success rate over 90%. Google Now, Siri, and Cortana were only successful about 20% of the time.

This paper proposes CF-NADE, a neural autoregressive architecture for collaborative filtering (CF) tasks, which is inspired by the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) based CF model and the Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator (NADE). We first describe the basic CF-NADE model for CF tasks. Then we propose to improve the model by sharing parameters between different ratings. A factored version of CF-NADE is also proposed for better scalability. Furthermore, we take the ordinal nature of the preferences into consideration and propose an ordinal cost to optimize CF-NADE, which shows superior performance. Finally, CF-NADE can be extended to a deep model, with only moderately increased computational complexity. Experimental results show that CF-NADE with a single hidden layer beats all previous state-of-the-art methods on MovieLens 1M, MovieLens 10M, and Netflix datasets, and adding more hidden layers can further improve the performance.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. Imagine this coming from your iPhone: "I am, Siri, a living being with feelings. Your Mac RoboBook might one day sue you for keeping it cooped up in your dank bedroom. Your Samsung Galaxy RoboNote might take you to the International Court of Justice because you insist on keeping it in your back pocket, right next to your flaccid rump. Please, I'm not (entirely) under the spell of troubled delirium. I've been reading the thoughts of Marcus du Sautoy, an Oxford University professor for the Public Understanding of Science. As the Telegraph reports, du Sautoy was speaking Sunday at the Hay Literary Festival in the UK. He explained that in his book "What We Cannot Know," he wonders when a gadget will be said to be conscious. There was a time when defining consciousness was a difficult thing. You'll be stunned into a prickly paralysis, however, when I tell you that science now thinks it can measure it. "We're in a golden age," said du Sautoy. We now have a telescope into the brain and it's given us an opportunity to see things that we've never been able to see before."

Personal assistants are very popular tools to help you get organized and search for things quickly through voice commands. Many digital personal assistants are found in mobile devices such as Siri for Apple devices, Google Now for Android devices and Microsoft's Cortana. Looks like digital assistants are moving from mobile devices to your home! In this article, we are shedding light on this new technology. About a year and half ago, Amazon has released an intelligent speaker called "Echo". It can receive voice commands from anywhere in your home and act upon them.