Onstage at the Code Conference this week, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos stressed that Amazon was committing to "intelligent" voice assistant devices in a big way. Bezos said that the company has more than 1,000 people working on the "Alexa and Echo ecosystem," and that what we've seen so far is "just the tip of the iceberg." Google introduced its own Amazon Echo competitor, Google Home, at I/O last month, in addition to its own voice-powered software ecosystem. And in a week and a half, Apple is reportedly going to announce that it's opening up Siri to outside developers (the company is also said to be working on its own Echo-like device). By flicking at the broader "ecosystem" of apps and services that Amazon wants to support through its Echo, Bezos is making explicit what the next stage of the competition for Echo will look like.

Liraz Margalit serves as customer experience psychologist for Clicktale, which helps businesses optimize visitor interactions with their websites. Welcome to the bot-centric future, which is set to make smartphone users -- i.e. almost everyone in the Western hemisphere -- navigate the internet in a chit-chat fashion with a virtual assistant. But "assistant" will soon become too impersonal… Alexa, Siri and others will cross the line from impersonal robots to entities that know our habits, routines, hobbies and interests just as well as, if not better than, our closest friends and relatives. For companies, this is a winning formula: Smartphone users have proved they are only willing to download and spend time in a limited number of apps. As such, businesses might be better off trying to connect with consumers in the apps where they are already spending plenty of time.

"The computer technology we have now is not really terrific. I use Apple's Siri on my iPhone all the time and I can do basic things like navigation. It can answer very simple questions, but in the future, instead of using keyboards, we will be speaking to our computers all the time – language will be the operating system. Computers will be a lot faster too," James said. "If your friend has Microsoft Cortana and you are using Google Now, and you try to get them match your schedules, there will be a conflict between these two operating systems. He also mentioned the problem of choosing which of these operating systems to use. "Another big problem is privacy.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've no doubt heard about chatbots. However, what's not commonly known is that chatbots have been around for years. What differentiates today's bots is the integration of back-end artificial intelligence, enabling them to do more than simply respond with the basic logic of yesterday. I find it's important to make distinctions between a bot and today's A.I.-powered intelligent assistants. Chatbots just happen to be conversational.

Look, Chrome is a great browser. It's feature-packed, overstuffed with fun extensions, and keeps your digital life organized across multiple devices. But maybe its insatiable resource-lust is bringing your laptop down. Maybe Google gives you the privacy willies. Or hey, it first showed up on Macs in 2009--maybe you've just got a seven-year itch.

Bots have officially taken over, and they're about to make our lives a whole lot easier. In April, Facebook introduced bots for Messenger, but the world's most popular social media platform is not the only company to open a "bot store" with consumer functions, and virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa are steadily increasing in both popularity and functionality. With Kik, you can chat with Michelangelo and see the climate conditions through Yahoo! With Operator, shopping is as easy as sending a text, and Pana, the online travel agency, turns a simple chat conversation via text into real bookings. In fact, everyone from 1–800-Flowers and the NBA to Taco Bell is jumping on the chatbot bandwagon.

If you so choose, you can delete voice items one at a time or purge all of them from the same page, which can be found in the depths of your Google account online. Actually, deleting all your voice clips doesn't purge them from Google's system. On my Voice & Activity page, I find each spoken item presented with a button next to it, allowing me to play the voice command back or delete it entirely. I can see why companies like Apple and Google want to work with spoken commands because speech recognition can only get better when computers confront more and more speech.

I'm starting to enjoy talking to computers. I don't use speech-to-text all that much because I'm so keyboard-oriented, but I love being able to run a search by voice or ask for last night's baseball scores. Siri works well for this, though I'm now using Android and am thus in the hands of Google Now, which keeps asking me to re-train it by speaking'OK Google' over and over again. Despite this annoyance, a day rarely passes that I don't talk to Google Now. Which raises an interesting question.

In a story June 29 about Microsoft's Windows 10, The Associated Press misspelled the name of a woman who sued Microsoft in small claims court. She is Teri Goldstein, not Terri. The story also provided an incorrect age for Goldstein. She declined to give her age for publication. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Microsoft has a birthday present for Windows 10 users: more capabilities for its Cortana digital assistant and new ways to ditch passwords.

Talking to WIRED before his speech at WIRED Health, Kyu Rhee, IBM's chief health officer, took from his pocket one of the iconic pieces of medical equipment: the stethoscope. The stethoscope is celebrating its 200th anniversary – the first, monaural version was created by the French doctor René Laennec. Despite technical advances – and the rise of other non-invasive techniques for internal examination – the stethoscope still means "doctor": according to a 2012 research paper, carrying a stethoscope makes a practitioner seem more trustworthy than any other piece of medical equipment. "It's amazing how medicine in some ways still leverages this piece of technology," said Rhee. "But I believe that in the next 200 years a cognitive system like Watson will be a part of every healthcare decision, for every stakeholder." IBM Watson's cognitive approach to computing absorbs data – structured and unstructured – and produces answers.