The app boom is over. There are now more than 4.2 million apps available for Android and iOS, but three-quarters of American smartphone users download a grand total of zero new apps per month. They might be mostly free and easy to access, but apps are struggling to make it on to our phones and tablets. According to comScore, we spend the majority of our screen time using just three apps, with the average American spending almost half their time in just one. With the eyeballs of the world glued to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Skype, developers have started turning once-simple chat apps into complex ecosystems. And at the centre of this change is a horde of subservient bots. You've just walked into your kitchen after a long week. "Play Etta James," you say.

Yes, artificial technology is rapidly improving -- and true, AI will invade the legal business before you know it -- but futuristic AI-infused robot lawyers aren't going to replace legal pros anytime soon. AI-based tools and technologies created and customized for legal work are coming for sure, though. AI-enabled software can use pattern recognition and extreme machine learning algorithms to help legal pros work faster. Their capability digest vast amounts of information and interpret it can help you work smarter, too. The time to start thinking about the first wave of AI legal tools is now.

This is not an easy choice. On the one hand, you have the original and champion home audio computer, the Amazon Echo. I've used an Echo for almost a year now and the Home for a few weeks. Both are good, but which one is better? I don't have review units of these.

Get yourself ready for the bot invasion. Powered by artificial intelligence and fueled with big data, bots are gearing up to serve people the data, insights, and services they demand. Anybody who's interacted with Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa or Microsoft's Cortana is familiar with the question-and-answer capabilities of bot technology, which uses natural language processing and machine learning to answer questions or provide information via email, social media, messaging platforms, and mobile apps. But the bots you've seen up to this point will pale in comparison to the bots of the future. Consider that, by 2020, the average person will have more conversation with bots than with their spouse, according to Gartner.

It seems like we've perennially been on the edge of major breakthroughs in AI (artificial intelligence), virtual reality, personal robots, and other such cool tech for the past two decades. The first set of science fiction imaginings came true rather rapidly -- think trans-continental air travel, space stations, even drone warfare -- but it appears that the emergence of next-gen tech wizardry has stalled. But while we still can't chat with the on-board computer on our personal spaceship, artificial intelligence is far more pervasive in our daily lives today than most of us realize. As anyone who has trained their mobile phone assistant can attest, years of painstaking research and investment in artificial intelligence technologies is starting to yield impressive results. Siri can predict our commute patterns, Microsoft Cortana warns us of bad weather, and the Google Assistant diligently sets calendar reminders with the impassive demeanor of an English butler of yore.

A year ago, I wrote that I had seen the future. I had attended the IBM Insights conference in Las Vegas, an entire conference devoted to the Internet of Things, analytics, cognitive marketing, and related topics. And if the concept of Moore's Law (that technology doubles every year, or every 18 months or two years, depending on what you read) holds true, then a lot has happened since then. While last year's future is now a history lesson, what is currently happening in the World of Watson is moving at warp speed! This past week more than 17,000 people attended IBM's World of Watson, the new name of the conference devoted to cognitive technology. Fifteen "influencers" were invited to attend IBM's first-ever Cognitive College that included product demonstrations and lectures about how Watson's cognitive abilities are impacting marketing and commerce.

The next flagship phone from Samsung, the Galaxy S8, is expected to arrive early next year with a major new feature: a built-in intelligent digital assistant. The artificial intelligence will be made possible by Samsung's acquisition of Viv Labs, which was announced last month. Founded by two of the creators of Siri, Apple's signature digital assistant, Viv Labs said its technology represents a "new paradigm" for how people interact with computers. The Viv AI uses something called dynamic program generation that creates software on the fly based on the intent of the request given to it. In a briefing reported yesterday by Reuters, Samsung said the addition of Viv's technology to the Galaxy S8 will enable a wide variety of new services for its customers.

Recently we wrote about how the'popular' Watson of Jeopardy fame still lingers in the memories of our non-data scientist colleagues and perhaps misleads them about the capabilities of AI. It's time we got in tune with the modern Watson, or more correctly IBM's Watson Group and its Watson platform and took a look at all there is to offer. There are three broad capabilities in today's AI and they are: Image and video processing: Largely driven by Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) this field has been getting most of the press with capabilities like facial and object recognition. Text and speech processing: This is generally known as Natural Language Processing (NLP), the capability to not only intake speech and text but to understand the nuanced context of strings of words, to perform search or translation on them, and output words and blocks of text and speech. Siri, Alexa, and Cortana represent examples of this field that used to be the butt of jokes but are now more than commercially acceptable. This field has been largely driven by Recurrent Neural Nets (RNNs).

There are now a wide variety of chatbots. You can now order a pizza with a bot. You can plan a weekend getaway with a bot. You can even play Pokémon GO, without playing Pokémon GO, with a bot. The world's big tech companies all agree that conversational interfaces are the next big thing.

Amazon is insisting on doing Black Friday and Cyber Monday on its own terms, stretching the promotional period that typically lasts a few days into a nearly two-month-long extravaganza. The Black Friday section of the site has been live since November 1 -- but now the deals are really heating up. SEE ALSO: Want an iPad Pro? Here's a great place to buy on Black Friday From Nov. 16 until Dec. 22 (for the worst procrastinators out there), new deals will be posted on the site as often as every five minutes. The first batch includes many deep discounts on Amazon devices (the full list is below). If you already have an Alexa-enabled device (the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, Amazon Fire TV, or Fire tablet), there are even more savings to be had.