Next time you schedule a meeting and an assistant named Amy or Andrew Ingram sets up the logistics, here's a pro tip: You may be chatting with a robot. And if it's one of x.ai's bots, you might never know the difference. That was my experience when I exchanged emails with "Andrew" to set up an interview with x.ai's CEO. After I emailed x.ai's press contact, she referred me to Andrew to hammer out the details. Andrew proposed a time, thanked me when I accepted and sent out a calendar invitation.

We love our Amazon Echo. Among other tasks, my four year old finds the knock knock jokes hilarious, the weather captivating, the ability to summon songs comparable to magic and Echo to be the best speller in the house. But I fear it's also turning our daughter into a raging asshole. You see, the prompt command to activate the Echo is "Alexa…" not "Alexa, please." And Alexa doesn't require a'thank you' before it's ready to perform another task.

Artificial Intelligence is poised to transform today's society as completely as the Internet did 20 years ago. The impact of both on all aspects of life, work, art, relationships, humanity, and consciousness, is as yet unknown-but not for long. In the past decade, Google introduced us to driverless cars and Apple launched Siri-a personal assistant we keep in our pockets. Robots have become an integral part of society on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health care. The ever-falling cost of sensors and powerful computers ensure that in the coming years, these robots will act on their own.

Until recently, Robyn Ewing was a writer in Hollywood, developing TV scripts and pitching pilots to film studios. Now she's applying her creative talents toward building the personality of a different type of character -- a virtual assistant, animated by artifical intelligence, that interacts with sick patients. Ewing works with engineers on the software program, called Sophie, which can be downloaded to a smartphone. The virtual nurse gently reminds users to check their medication, asks them how they are feeling or if they are in pain, and then sends the data to a real doctor. As tech behemoths and a wave of start-ups double down on virtual assistants that can chat with human beings, writing for AI is becoming a hot job in Silicon Valley.

Last week I hired a personal assistant named Amy Ingram. She set up four meetings for me, adding them to my calendar with the relevant contact details included. She rescheduled twice when the person I was supposed to meet had to cancel at the last minute. Instead of sending half a dozen emails per meeting, I only needed to compose one to kick things off. This all sounds like pretty simple stuff, but Amy isn't a human being: it's a virtual assistant made by the New York City startup X.ai.

Lutron announced today that its Caseta wireless lighting systems are now compatible with Amazon's Alexa voice-control system, enabling owners of Amazon's Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, or Amazon Fire TV to control Caseta-connected lighting fixtures with voice commands. "Caseta users who also own Alexa-capable devices can now dim, brighten, and control individual lights or groups of lights using their voice," Lutron product manager Neil Orchowski said in an embargoed briefing last week.

While Siri now lives on the phones of hundreds of millions of Apple users, just a few people are responsible for helping get the now ubiquitous assistant off the ground. One of those people is Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and CEO of Siri and now co-founder and CEO of Viv, a new platform-based AI product. Dag is the CEO and co-founder of Viv, which he started with Siri vets Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham. Previously, he was the Co-founder and CEO of Siri after spinning the technology out of Stanford Research Institute in 2007. After Apple acquired Siri in 2010 Dag became the Director of iPhone Apps at Apple running the Siri and speech recognition teams.

While voice-recognition-powered virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana and Amazon's Echo continue to get more useful and reliable on the march to platform-dom, there is a parallel wave of development underway that has captured the public eye, where machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing are getting corralled for more narrowly purposed means -- by way of bots. Today, a New York-based startup called X.ai -- which has developed a bot that helps you arrange meetings with other people by way of a virtual assistant ('Amy' or'Andrew') -- announced that it has raised 23 million. The Series B funding will be used to take X.ai from a closed and free beta to a commercial product, and the startup also plans to hire more data scientists and other engineers. X.ai is not releasing details of its valuation, but we understand from reliable sources that it is now around 100 million -- a decent jump on the 40 million valuation the company had when it announced its Series A of 9 million in January 2015. The funding is being led by Two Sigma Ventures, with other new investors including DCM Ventures and Work Bench Ventures.

That may sound a little less weird once you know that Amy is an artificially intelligent personal assistant and the brainchild of a startup called X.ai. Then she takes over the task of coordinating schedules and setting the date. On Thursday, X.ai announced a fresh round of funding led by Two Sigma Ventures, a VC fund that invests in data-focused startups. That funding will help X.ai -- which has been operating in private beta since 2014 -- roll out out its service to the public this summer and release an enterprise edition before the end of the year. But are we ready for robots to take over our calendars?

Artificial intelligence company X.ai has raised 23 million in new funding that'll be used to support development of its personal assistant technology. The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures and will be allocated to hiring more data scientists, improving customer acquisition, and marketing to enterprise customers. Other investors in the company's latest round include DCM Ventures, Work-Bench Ventures, and existing investors like IA Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Softbank Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, CrunchFund, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. X.ai was founded in 2014 by former Visual Revenue CEO Dennis Mortensen, along with Alex Poon, Matt Casey, and Marcos Jimenez. Its first product is based on using artificial intelligence to book your meetings for you.