Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference may be taking place June 13-17 this year, if Siri is to be believed. The digital assistant acted as a spokeswoman Monday to reveal the dates to inquisitive users who asked, "When is WWDC?" Apple has not updated the WWDC website, but the announcement and dates line up with the company's announcement history. Siri was enthusiastic for WWDC 2016, which will take place in San Francisco. The exact location was not revealed, but 9to5 Mac speculates that the city's Moscone West convention hall will once again host the huge conference. When Siri was asked about WWDC 2016 earlier in the day, it stated the dates were not announced yet. WWDC 2015, which took place June 8-12, was announced April 14, 2015.

Thanks to Siri, we have a date for Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The tech giant will host its developers event June 13-17 in San Francisco. Although Apple did not release a formal statement detailing the timing of WWDC, users could uncover details by asking digital voice assistant Siri "when is WWDC?" The event usually takes place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. As with previous years, Apple will likely reveal the first details on iOS 10, the latest version of its mobile operating system.

I'll be honest: Even though I'm supposed to be a technology expert, I've long resisted using Siri and my smartphone's voice commands. All the errors were frustrating and often seemed to eat up more time than just typing in commands and opening up apps manually. These days, though, I've found myself using Siri more often. Speech recognition has gotten a lot better, and Siri has gotten a lot smarter and more powerful. You can do virtually anything via your phone's voice commands, from posting to Twitter to finding the best pizza pie to figuring out just how deep 20,000 leagues really is.

When it comes to announcing plans for an event, the folks in Cupertino typically send out invites and info via email. That's not the case this year, though, as Apple is relying on its virtual assistant to inform the masses about its annual WWDC soirée. Thanks to Siri, we know the developer conference is scheduled for June 13th through the 17th in San Francisco, the event where we'll hear details on new versions of OS X, iOS and WatchOS.

Jacob Katuva used to get up at dawn to cycle 12 miles from his village to collect water with his uncles and cousins when he was growing up in Kenya. Now he is part of a research team at the University of Oxford using cloud computing and mobile sensors to monitor water wells and help ensure that thousands of villages in rural Africa and Asia have a safe, secure supply of water. The time spent finding and carrying water, if local wells are not reliable, steals precious time from farming, making a living or going to school. It can even force people to revert to unsanitary water sources shared with animals. Water issues are tied to a cycle of poverty.

Amy Ingram, the artificial intelligence personal assistant from startup X.ai, sounds remarkably like a real person. The company designed her to take on the mundane tasks of scheduling meetings and e-mailing about appointments. If a bot had access to your calendar and was cc-ed on correspondence, why couldn't it do the work for you? After she made her debut in 2014, users praised her "humanlike tone" and "eloquent manners." But what most people don't realize about this artificial intelligence is that it isn't totally artificial: Behind almost every e-mail is an actual human--someone like 24-year-old Willie Calvin. Calvin, who worked as an AI trainer for X.ai before he said he quit in October, was part of the reason Amy never tripped up, sending the sort of blind response that reveals she's a bot.

Amazon hasn't announced any plans to make its own smartwatch, but a new Indiegogo campaign is promising the next-best thing. Much like the Amazon Echo connected speaker, CoWatch will tap into Amazon's voice services for controlling smart home devices, ordering rides from Uber, adding things to your shopping list, and asking for traffic and weather reports, among other uses. There's no mention of any official involvement from Amazon, but that may not be necessary given that Alexa is now available to third-party hardware makers. Alexa aside, the CoWatch is fairly standard smartwatch fare, using Bluetooth to pair with either an Android phone or iPhone. It has a round, always-on Super AMOLED display, stainless steel and zirconia ceramic body, step counter, heart rate sensor, and water resistance.

Shazam has a lot more competition from Siri, Cortana and other services, but the music recognition service has tried to stay on top with Google Now integration, faster recognition and other new tricks. The company has just added a feature that seems indispensable, but somehow wasn't available before: syncing across devices. As long as you're logged in to your account, it remembers any songs you identify and lets you see them from the desktop, iOS or other devices.

Humans have always had a complicated relationship with new "technologies." From awe to fear, centuries ago, Plato even worried that writing would adversely affect people's memories. Modernity has had a particular curiosity regarding artificial intelligence (AI). From Terminator-style killer robots to emotive humanoids, the mention of AI brings to mind the many silver screen renderings of some future civilization. More likely than any of these, however, is the reality that AI will probably turn out to be another commonplace technology that, while novel at first, will end up integrated into our everyday lives.

The terminators from Skynet, the agents of the Matrix, the Decepticons…Hollywood has done a good job portraying artificial intelligence (AI) as an existential threat to the human race. The scary thing is that this idea may not be purely science fiction. In fact, many leading technologists today seem to share the concern that at some point in the not-too-distant future, human kind could be beholden to super-intelligent computer overlords. That is a scary thing to think about, and even if the worse does not come to pass, AI will certainly impact everyone's life in some form or another. So let's look at some history of AI, its current state, and potential risks and possible outcomes.