She's smart, resourceful, and roughly the same size as two Campbell's soup cans stacked on top of one another. Her name's Alexa, and unless you've been hiding under a technology- averse rock for the past several months, you've probably heard of her. The Amazon Echo packs a technological maze of wires, motherboards, speakers, and LED's into a 9 x 3 cylindrical frame. It's impressively accurate voice recognition technology is the perfect key to tie your smart home together (for a detailed teardown of an Echo, check out this article from I Fix It) Here at Inspire Energy, we've road tested the Amazon Echo since early April of this year. Here are three important set -ups you'll want to nail on your first day of ownership so that you can get the most out of Alexa right from the get go.

Ask Apple's Siri digital assistant if she's evil, and she'll respond curtly, "Not really." Repeat a famous line from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," in which a computer on a spaceship kills nearly all the human crew, and Siri groans. And who can blame her? We humans have a morbid fascination with machines rising up to wipe us out or to enslave us as cocooned, flesh-and-blood battery packs. You can see that vision of the future streaming over Netflix whenever you want.

It's your nighttime routine: You drop your phone onto the nightstand charging pad, and it asks about your day. You tell it, talking to the virtual personal assistant just like you'd talk to a friend. Your phone's artificial intelligence knows you almost as well as you know yourself (maybe even better). So when it suggests ways to get through tomorrow's calendar, you trust its advice. AI is practically everywhere, and getting smarter all the time.

Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) artificial intelligence Alexa can now place orders on Amazon, making it even easier for shoppers to use the service with more frequency. Alexa is the digital voice assistant inside the company's Echo Bluetooth speakers. It previously could only re-order items that had already been purchased, but now it can order anything that is available to Amazon Prime members, with some exceptions. Users simply ask Alexa for a product available with Prime, she makes a suggestion, reports the price and a simple "yes" buys it. There are millions of items now available for ordering through Alexa and quite a few that are not, including Amazon Fresh, Amazon Prime Pantry and Amazon Prime Now items.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern.

Many aspects of my life are neat and organized. My computer is not one of them. I rarely purge my system of old files and photos. I forget to uninstall software I don't need anymore. My desktop is a mess of thumbnails and documents.

The bot revolution is happening fast for Facebook. After launching third-party bots in April offering everything from forecasts to your boarding pass, the social network says there are now more than 11,000 bots active on Facebook. To celebrate, Facebook is adding a bunch of new features that could show up on your favorite bots soon--if developers enable them, that is. One big problem with bots is they feel a little antiquated. Many of them will only respond to certain commands, which can make the whole experience kind of tedious. You try a certain command.

The beta version of the Google app is usually the first to spill the goods on upcoming features. That's what appears to be the case in version 6.1, as we finally catch a glimpse of how the new Google Assistant may work when it comes time to take over as your new best friend. In a dig into the APK, Android Police found several code strings that reference the assistant being ready to help when summoned. It's not available now, but Google often does a lot of the pre-work before features go live. Expect to see more before the Google Assistant debuts, which should occur alongside Android Nougat.

Cortana in Windows 10 is a great tool to take a quick look at news headlines on your PC, but compared to competitors like Google Now I sometimes find Microsoft's choice of news sites lacking. Recently, Microsoft added a new capability to fix that--at least a little bit. Cortana now lets you banish news sites you don't like from your feed?. There are some reports that this is a U.S.-only feature for now. First, if you're not using Cortana to deliver news open the personal digital assistant on your PC.

Humans have a lot to contribute even in the face of artificial intelligence, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella said Wednesday on CNBC's " Power Lunch ." "I definitely fall into the camp of thinking of AI as augmenting human capability and capacity," Nadella said. Algorithmically, for example, how can AI be programmed to care for humans -- not have bias built in? How can it be trustworthy? How can it be transparent?