Amazon Echo's voice assistant has gained a handful of new skills, including the ability to answer questions about your kid's health. It now has access to KidsMD, a new app powered by info prepared by doctors from Boston Children's Hospital. You can ask it about various symptoms like fever, coughing or headache if your kid's experiencing any, as well as age- and weight-specific dosing guidelines for various medications. Just say "Alexa, ask KidsMD about [symptom]/dosing." The feature sounds especially useful if you're frantically dealing with a sick child and don't have time to pick up a phone to do a Google search.

Is an intelligent robot capable of taking over your job? New research implies the answer is probably yes -- if not now, then very soon. Fortune magazine recently stated that "technological unemployment" is a significant factor in the rising number of working-age men who are without jobs. Geoff Colvin's recent book, Humans Are Underrated, observes that robots, augmented by AI, continue to take over repetitive tasks in the workplace, many of which used to be considered beyond the capability of technology. These tasks include translating written languages, loading and unloading a dishwasher, making hamburgers, and analyzing thousands of documents during the discovery phase of a lawsuit.

They heyday of the app is not coming to an end any time soon. But the next evolution of the apps economy is starting to take shape. And it looks nothing like what we think about as "apps." But that does not mean that the structure of software development and distribution will fundamentally be altered. The app store model of creating software, uploading it to a platform and wirelessly transmitting it to people on demand--a system which dramatically changed the nature of software distribution--will remain intact.

And this opportunity is bigger and more user friendly than any app platform yet. Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Slack are a few of the biggest names leading the way. In the past week, the media has been in a bot frenzy, brought to a peak by Facebook's announcement of a complete platform for building experiences inside Messenger. A flurry of articles have come out proclaiming there to be a new gold rush on bots, with some calling Zuckerberg's announcement "the most consequential event for the tech industry since Apple announced the App Store and iPhone SDK in March 2008." Zuck's was the second top-shelf tech keynote talking about bots this spring.

Mark Zuckerberg at F8. "I've never met anyone who likes calling businesses." ANALYSIS: Love it or hate it, Messenger is Facebook's most important product. Already, Facebook the social network feels like the clunky backend of the real product, an app where you actually talk to your friends, who barely post anything personal on the site itself any more. It's not as splashy as Snapchat, but there's a reason it consistently beats those apps in engagement and app downloads. Sixty billion messages are sent a day on Messenger.

This book covers the topic of recommender systems comprehensively, starting with the fundamentals and then exploring the advanced topics. Algorithms and evaluation: These chapters discuss the fundamental algorithms in recommender systems, including collaborative filtering methods, content-based methods, knowledge-based methods, ensemble-based methods, and evaluation. Recommendations in specific domains and contexts: The context of a recommendation can be viewed as important side information that affects the recommendation goals. Different types of context such as temporal data, spatial data, social data, tagging data, and trustworthiness are explored. Advanced topics and applications: Various robustness aspects of recommender systems, such as shilling systems, attack models, and their defenses are discussed.

Soon we'll be chatting with virtual robots on Messenger, if Facebook gets its way. At the company's annual F8 developer conference on Tuesday, Facebook unveiled plans to get people to connect with bots via the messaging platform with over 900 million users. Bots to chat with customer service, news organizations, businesses, and apps are all on the table. "I've never met anyone who likes calling a business," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. "No one wants to have to install a new app for every service or business they want to interact with. We believe there's got to be a better way to do this."

If you think chatbots are hot right now -- being used in psychotherapy, turning into racist trolls, and presenting an existential threat to Apple -- just wait until they turn into full-fledged personal assistants. In five years time, digital personal assistants will be even more important than smartphones, says University of Washington computer scientist Pedro Domingos, author of "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World." "What you have right now on your smartphone is dozens of apps," Domingos tells Tech Insider, "with each app doing it's own thing." On any given Friday night, you use one app to find a restaurant, another to buy a movie ticket, another to figure out how to get to where you're going, and another to find a date to take out with you. "It's incredibly annoying," he says, since the apps "don't talk to each other and you have to learn all these different interfaces."

The hidden details of the iPhone 7 screen, should you buy the iPhone SE or the iPhone 6S, why the Apple Watch is really an iPad, and what does Siri know about Game of Thrones? Forbes contributor Ewan Spence brings you this week's Apple headlines (Pho

In more than 30 years in the BBC I have never had a personal assistant, or anyone to help fix my busy schedule (extraordinary, I know). But this week I took on a PA with a specific brief to organise my meetings. She's called Amy Ingram, and I regret to say her work so far leaves a little to be desired. But then again she is a virtual assistant, or bot. Amy is the product of two years of work by a New York based artificial intelligence start-up called x.ai. Its co-founder and chief executive Dennis Mortensen tells Tech Tent in an interview for this afternoon's programme that the idea was to prove that artificial intelligence could now handle a single useful task.