Chatbots can order flowers for you on Facebook. An intelligent assistant can schedule a meeting. Now, a new update for your iPhone will be packed with new automations to make our lives easier and maybe even reduce stress, and it won't cost you a cent when it debuts this fall (unless you need to get a new iPhone). This week at a developer conference in California, Apple announced iOS 10 and focused mostly on how to make your phone "think differently" by thinking for you and saving time. There are some brilliant new updates, but here are the ones that impressed me the most and offer the most automation.

In the age-old tech struggle between open and controlled systems, Apple has realized that when it comes to artificial intelligence, it needs to edge toward open. The computer giant has announced it will be opening up its digital assistant Siri to third-party apps and at the same time has put out an API to its artificial intelligence technology. Realistically, the company has been given little choice: Amazon's Alexa has taken off, in large part due to it opening up to other companies, and Google's artificial intelligence systems have streaked ahead of Apple and Siri because when it comes to such a complex and wide-ranging interplay of information and action, broader is better. Where Siri was once a wonder – it worked where other systems didn't – it risks becoming an also-ran, with only Apple fanbois crowding round it in excitement at the latest nerd joke. Not that Apple is taking the news well.

Apple announced today that it will be opening up Siri to third-party developers through an API, giving outside apps the ability to activate from Siri's voice commands, and potentially endowing Siri with a wide range of new skills and datasets. The move follows similar announcements by Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, all of which are betting that voice commands and chatbots will be one of the next big computing paradigms. When Steve Jobs introduced Siri to the world five years ago, it felt like a revelatory advancement. Sure, there had been digital assistants before, but not one you speak to naturally or carry around in your pocket. In the time since, however, this kind of conversational AI proliferated out to lots of devices, with big offerings from most of Apple's major competitors.

In the age-old tech struggle between open and controlled systems, Apple has realized that when it comes to artificial intelligence, it needs to edge toward open. The computer giant has announced it will be opening up its digital assistant Siri to third-party apps and at the same time has put out an API to its artificial intelligence technology. Realistically, the company has been given little choice: Amazon's Alexa has taken off, in large part due to it opening up to other companies, and Google's artificial intelligence systems have streaked ahead of Apple and Siri because when it comes to such a complex and wide-ranging interplay of information and action, broader is better. Where Siri was once a wonder – it worked where other systems didn't – it risks becoming an also-ran, with only Apple fanbois crowding round it in excitement at the latest nerd joke. Not that Apple is taking the news well.

As more information continues to pour in about what happened at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, here's what we know about the shooter, Omar Mateen. The logo of Jack'd, an online dating and chat app for gay men. According to some reports, Orlando shooter Omar Mateen used the app to message men in the months prior to the shooting. SAN FRANCISCO -- The CEO of Jack'd, a Tinder-like gay chat and dating app, says he hasn't been contacted by law enforcement since reports surfaced late Monday Orlando shooter Omar Mateen might have been using the app for at least a year. The service also hasn't been able to substantiate Mateen had been a member, said Hector Camacho, CEO of Jack'd parent company Online Buddies. According to the Los Angeles Times, Mateen, 29, had messaged at least one regular Pulse patron sporadically over the past year using the Jack'd app.

In the meantime, Apple can keep its rivals at bay by leveraging the greatest advantage it enjoys today: its leading position across multiple consumer-device categories. Amazon may have a nifty set-top TV box--but if you already have an iPhone, you might prefer the Apple TV. Google's virtual assistant software may be more powerful than Siri--but if Siri already lives on three of your devices, why switch to Google when it's time to buy a fourth? Skype might have its advantages over FaceTime, but your grandmother has the latter pre-installed on her iPad. In other words, Apple can prop up its software by putting it front and center on all the platforms it already has, and making sure they all talk to each other--and no one else.

Microsoft's announcement, on Monday, that it would purchase LinkedIn--its biggest acquisition ever, at more than twenty-six billion dollars--brought to mind an earlier takeover attempt, almost a decade ago. Back in the mid-aughts, Microsoft's C.E.O. at the time, Steve Ballmer, flew to Palo Alto to try to convince Mark Zuckerberg, the young C.E.O. of Facebook, to let Microsoft buy his company. During Facebook's first couple of years, bigger companies had dismissed it, and social networking in general, as a fad for college kids; Zuckerberg had even admitted that he didn't care how Facebook would eventually make money. But Ballmer, who wanted to catch up to Google in the online-advertising business, was beginning to see Facebook's power. People were signing up for accounts in extraordinary numbers.

Via @washingtonpost: An Apple spokeswoman confirmed that the bug was fixed Tuesday morning. Most consumers should have a fix in place – without the need for a software update. Over time, Apple has quietly prevented several Siri "features" by server-side, remotely, so at any time can be opened and closed again, in case of…, without your knowledge, and you would never know. Even, server-side Apple can give Siri unrestricted/unlimited access to our iDevices; an "authorized" person could get full access to any iPhone in the world by asking Siri with a specific secret voice command that could be changed at any time. Still at present, Siri shows all reminders and events in calendar, and allows add, modify and delete, without asking for passcode.

By the nature of artificial intelligence, Apple's virtual assistant Siri needs a lot more data and a lot more people using it to get dramatically smarter. That's what Apple is shooting for by bringing Siri to the Mac and opening it to third-party developers. With more people using the smart digital assistant, Siri could become the service that it was expected to be. With Apple pushing ahead with expanding Siri, industry analysts expect the increasing A.I.-focused competition among industry giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple should propel smart technologies to a whole new level in a few years. "A.I. means a lot to all four of these companies," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.

SAP SE is exploring augmented reality and intelligent assistant software in initiatives intended to boost employee productivity, according to new SAP CIO Thomas Saueressig, who at 31 is the youngest CIOworking for a global 2000 company. More productive employees will ultimately improve the business software maker's ability to serve customers, one of the German company's core tenets. "I fundamentally believe that the new generation and the expectations of our customers and our employees are changing so significantly," says Saueressig, who took over for Helen Arnold on May 1. "And we need to shift our focus purely on the end-user [employees and customers]." Saueressig is something of a rarity among first-time IT leaders. As a millennial, he is a member of a generation HPE CEO Meg Whitman describes as as supremely confident if not entitled.