Last month, the Washington Post reported on a surprising new job in Silicon Valley: bot-writer. "Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools," the Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin wrote. These personalities, Dwoskin reported, will soon be joined by more specialized bots developed by other companies, among them Sophie and Molly, "nurse avatars" that talk to patients about their medical conditions. There's even a "guru avatar" in development, designed to teach meditation. These products are exciting and futuristic--just a decade ago, the possibility of conversing with a computer program seemed like science fiction.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is very bullish on his company's artificial intelligence push. So bullish, in fact, that Amazon has invested four years of research into its key project in AI -- and stacked that project with a sizable staff. Bezos said at the Code Conference that the team on Alexa, Amazon's smart voice-assistant software, and Echo, its flagship device, is now more than 1,000 employees. "We've been working behind the scenes for the last four years," he said about Echo and Alexa. Other tech giants are moving into the space.

Where else but the Code Conference can you expect to hear from the Tech industry's biggest players like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai? Speaking to the Code conference here, Bezos, whose company has a hit on its hand with the Echo connected speaker, said "it's hard to overstate how big of an impact this will have on society over the next 20 years. It doesn't mean phones are going to go away or that voice actions will replace screens. As long as people have eyes, they have screens." The Echo speaker can turn on lights, access online music and answer queries by waking the speaker by stating the word Alexa.

The rapid developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning technology have become a huge talking point within the online dating space, as companies look for new ways to innovate and remain relevant in a growingly saturated market. At GDI's European conference earlier this month, a number of top industry executives tipped AI as the next big trend within the industry, noting the obvious potential this type of technology offers dating companies looking to create an automated application. One new platform already looking to capitalise on this growing interest in AI within online dating is Quinn, a recently-launched mobile app which acts as an personal matchmaker for each user. Quinn – which stands for Questions and Insights – was founded by London-based Australian natives Dan Joyce and Jared Mooring, alongside the same team that launched friend-of-a-friend dating platform My Mate Your Date back in 2014. The app gets to know every user by asking them up to eight questions each day, all of which are selected from its library of over 200 questions using AI, in order to work out which questions are the most fitting to ask at that time.

As banks, financial services providers and brands predict and plan for the way consumers will manage their money in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the business development strategy for 2016 and beyond. Gideon Hyde, co-founder of Market Gravity, explains how and why artificial intelligence (AI) could hold the key to standing out in banking and financial services. AI is already around us and used everyday within payments, money management and for robo-advice, particularly in the area of intelligent digital assistants that handle regular customer service enquiries and tasks. It can process "big data" far more efficiently than humans and can recognise speech, images, text, patterns of online behaviour, for example to detect fraud as well as appropriate advertisements for upselling. Smart machines and technology can turn data into customer insights and enhance service provisions, bringing the digital experience closer to the human interaction for consumers.

For consumers seeking convenience and speed, it all sounds great. But how will any of it make Google money? The Mountain View, Calif., company's apparent transition from go-to search engine to omnipresent virtual assistant probably will require rethinking its advertising business. By tracking Web browsing, emails, chats and more, Google has become a dominant force in digital ads. It mines that wealth of personal data to present ads to the people most likely to care about them.

You might have heard of travel virtual assistants Pana and Lola but you will definitely have heard of Google Allo and Assistant. If Google Trips is being seen as the app to end all other in-destination apps, then should Allo and Assistant put to rest travel-specific concierge and chat-based apps? The audience at last week's SITA 2016 Air Transport IT Summit was treated to a demo of how Assistant might work for travellers. Treated because it was, it seems, only the second time the system was getting an airing. The job title alone of Marcin Brodziak, the senior engineer from Google who presented at the Summit, is quite telling in itself – engineering lead of conversational travel.

As we've discussed, Facebook's bot platform is still in its early stages, and most apps aren't ready yet to become part of your everyday life. This is mainly due to shortfalls in natural language processing and the trial-and-error process of developers actually figuring out how users are going to use bots. But one company, the slightly inappropriately named And Chill, has figured out how to build a bot that is actually well suited for Facebook's chat-based interface. And Chill is a movie recommendation engine that is eschewing the traditional "like/dislike" model of recommendation, instead pledging to dig deeper into the reasons a viewer would want to watch a certain movie. The bot can be accessed via Facebook Messenger or SMS.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos thinks that we're at the "beginning of a golden era" when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence. "It's hard to overstate how much of an impact it's going to have over the next 20 years," he said on stage at Vox's Media's Code Conference on Tuesday night. Not only is it the first inning, "it might even be the first guy up at bat," he laughed. Amazon currently sells a voice-controlled smart speaker called Echo that's powered by its artificial intelligence assistant, Alexa. Right now, Alexa can help users do things like order groceries, play music, or make to-do lists.

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry. One of the themes coming out of the recent Google I/O conference was that Google plans to make a more aggressive push into the consumer hardware business. The company announced the Home product, an AI-oriented service to compete with Amazon Echo; a VR headset; and a new smartphone division that will build and ship its modular Ara phones. Former Motorola CEO Rick Osterloh will lead the new hardware division. In a Recode post last week, Mark Bergen argued that one of the key unanswered questions coming out of I/O is how these exciting new products are going to be distributed. Getting products such as Nexus and Chromecast into consumers' hands is something Google has "never done well," Bergen wrote, further suggesting that if Google wants to more directly compete with Apple, the company will also need to think about its retail strategy.