On slide 133 of her much-anticipated annual Internet Trends report, venture capitalist Mary Meeker made a curious comparison. She put a graph of iPhone sales side-by-side with a sales estimate for the Echo, the newish wireless speaker and voice-activated personal assistant from Amazon. That juxtaposition might seem strange, but Meeker was making a point. Sales of the iPhone have been slowing, and according to Meeker's projections, they'll go into decline by the end of 2016. Right as this is happening, sales of the Amazon Echo are starting to take off. It's a sign that using voice as a way to command your tech is steadily gaining traction.

The technology behind Alexa, the voice inside Amazon's Echo speaker, could become Amazon's fourth business pillar, alongside retail marketplace, Amazon Prime, and Amazon Web Services. Amazon has more than 1,000 people working on artificial intelligence and third-party apps that people have built using the company's SDK, Bezos, the founder and CEO of the company, said at Recode's Code Conference Tuesday. During an interview with Walt Mossberg, he said the company licenses the technology to others so they can embed it in an app or device. There's also a program that allows companies to build apps that teaches Alexa new skills. Bezos called artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning intelligence "gigantic" and says it's probably difficult to "overstate the impact it will have on society over the next 20 years."

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes difficult tasks possible, such as sorting and recognising patterns in incredibly large data sets. The most challenging problems often have unexpected input and are often referred to as AI-compete or AI-difficult, implying the need for human-like computation. While some might think of AI as technology mostly used for complex visual tasks – or even as a far-fetched concept only found in science fiction – it's used in more ways than most people realise. That raises the question: could modern society get by without this fast-growing technology? Depending on the source, some claim AI has been around since ancient times, when the Greeks had myths about robots, and engineers from Egypt and China built automatons.

"[Artificial intelligence] is the most exciting thing going on right now -- it's the holy grail that anyone in computer science has been thinking about," Bill Gates said on stage at Vox Media's Code Conference on Wednesday. Speech recognition and computer vision have seen more progress in the last five years than ever before. But Melinda said that stats around women in computer science are troubling: Only 17% of computer science graduates today are women, down from a peak of 37%. "We ought to care more about women being in computer science," she said. "You need women participating in these things." If women aren't active in the space, it will influence the things that artificial intelligence research is conducted around and applied to, she reasoned.

SAY it out loud and the machines will know. Search engines are moving beyond the web and into the messy real world. Every call into or out of US prisons is recorded. It can be important to know what's being said, because some inmates use phones to conduct illegal business on the outside. But the recordings generate huge quantities of audio that are prohibitively expensive to monitor with human ears.

There's Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Echo who serve as digital assistants in the home. Don't hold your breath for IBM's Watson to make an appearance anytime soon. IBM would prefer Watson, which garnered the spotlight when it competed -- and bested -- two "Jeopardy" champs on the popular television game show, to remain open so others could build devices and products that take advantage of its intelligence, said IBM CEO Ginny Rometty. Still, she believes artificial intelligence will have a big impact down the line. "There's no doubt in my mind that cognitive AI will impact everything in our lives in five years," Rometty said on Wednesday at Re/Code's Code conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California.

If the battle between rival digital assistants can be summed up by the NBA championships, then Google's take would be the Golden State Warriors? That's assuming, of course, the record-setting Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers to defend their NBA title. It's the analogy used by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who characterized the competition as more friendly than bloody. "This is not like'Game of Thrones,'" he said Wednesday at Recode's Code conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California. Artificial intelligence is already a hot topic at the conference, and it's a big part of Google's future.

In-home robots to help with everything from cooking and cleaning to childcare and companionship have been the stuff of sci-fi for decades. But, with the unveiling this week of the Wall-E-like Asus Zenbo, this is the year that science-fiction could turn into science-fact, introducing home assistants that can talk to you, control your electronics and help out with the chores. Here are five that could be knocking at your door in the near future. The latest robot to offer help around the home is Asus's Zenbo, which, at 599 ( 410), costs about the same as a smartphone. Designed to be a do-it-all smarthome assistant, Zenbo can drive itself around your place, using various cameras to keep it from bumping into the walls.

On an unseasonably hot Wednesday at the end of May, a little voice in my head was telling me to run faster. "It's time to get your heart rate up," she told me. This wasn't my inner masochist, like it usually is. On this particular run, it was the voice of Vi, a digital assistant baked inside a pair of prototype in-ear headphones. Vi is the first consumer product from wearable technology company LifeBeam, which has provided the tech backbone for products from Samsung, Under Armour, and JBL, among others.

Picture this: At every step of a patient's trip through the hospital, a virtual assistant awaits, ready to answer questions, pull up medical records -- or snap photos during surgery. Hospital staff and patients walked through that futuristic hospital scenario one recent afternoon at a new simulation center at Boston Children's Hospital. Fifty people came to dream up ways that Amazon's Alexa voice-recognition software program could help in the clinic and at home. The hospital dove into voice-assisted software last month, when it released an Alexa-based app called KidsMD that gives parents advice when their children catch a fever. Children's "is leading the way when it comes to hands-free work in hospitals" using Alexa, an Amazon spokeswoman said.