Dave Egts is chief technologist, North America public sector at Red Hat. Artificial intelligence showed a lot of promise decades ago when many thought expert systems and fuzzy logic would be used everywhere. Unfortunately, that didn't quite come to fruition, largely because the concepts were ahead of their time. Today, AI is a reality. We use it at home (the aforementioned Alexa, or Apple's Siri) and at work (so-called smart machines that do everything from monitoring social media traffic to providing second opinions for cancer treatments).

If you think using your smartphone to turn on your lights is cool, you'll flip when you can do that (and more) with just your voice. In fact, when I reviewed the Amazon Echo last year, I predicted a lot of people would buy more than one Echo so they could put them in multiple rooms. Amazon was smarter than that. As soon as the company realized it had a hit product, it came up with less-expensive versions: the Tap, the Echo Dot, and most recently, a revamped Echo Dot. The Tap has a less-expensive speaker, and the Dot isn't designed to play music at all, but both can summon Alexa, Amazon's cloud-based virtual assistant.

This is not the first time Forrester has made an attention-grabbing prediction about technology leading to the disappearance of jobs. It also said that the same would happen in the business-to-business sales arena, and that current virtual assistant technology spelled the beginning of the end of those jobs as well. How should the retail industry feel about all this? Retail has been pretty progressive thus far in testing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in both virtual assistant form and physical robot form. While there may be some concern about what happens as these technologies are perfected and become affordable enough to be deployed throughout the retail ecosystem, the retail industry for now seems fairly enthused about the ways in which these technologies can help to better serve customers and make stores and operations more efficient.

What's all the fuss about the voice-activated home speaker that Amazon is due to release in the UK and Germany in late September? This gadget has been available in the US for over a year and has proven a minor hit, with sales estimates between 1.6m and 3m. But these figures belie the potential impact this kind of artificial intelligence device could have on our lives in the near future. Echo doesn't just let you switch on your music by voice command. It's the first of what will be several types of smart home appliances that work beyond simple tasks like playing music or turning on a light.

Pepper the robot seems friendly now, but it may secretly be gunning for Neil deGrasse Tyson's job. Robots, self-driving cars and virtual assistants will eliminate 6 percent of all jobs in the US by 2021, according to a new report from Forrester Research. Customer service representatives will be the first positions affected, then truck and taxi drivers. But, employees working in any easy-to-automate job may be at threat, as businesses look to cut costs with these robots and intelligent assistants. "By 2021 a disruptive tidal wave will begin," the report stated. "Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics and consumer services."

Thinking machines are still decades away from stealing our jobs, but in the meantime they could drastically improve our quality of life and even earn us some extra cash, according to a leading artificial intelligence expert. Toby Simpson, chief technology officer at Cambridge global learning and simulation firm Ososim, will discuss how AI will impact our future at the London Press Club's monthly gathering on Monday. Mr Simpson previously worked at AI company DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 and is now based in King's Cross. He specialises in biologically inspired artificial intelligence, which helps to make it more human-like and emotional in its interactions with people. At the event for industry professionals in Whitehall -- called Technology: How far can it go?

Tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Baidu know that people aren't filling their devices with apps anymore. Just 35 percent of smartphone users download a single app in an average month, and the average app loses 90 percent of its daily active users within 30 days of release. While it might be fun to slice fruit or slingshot cartoon birds while waiting for the bus, these apps can't offer the frictionless experience users crave. Consumers want a new, on-demand kind of app: one clad in a conversational interface, ready to serve, and capable of complex actions. Want to check your flight status, book an Uber for when you land, and schedule your meetings for that afternoon?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has gradually become an integral part of modern life, from Siri and Spotify's personalized features on our phones to automatic fraud alerts from our banks whenever a transaction appears suspicious. Defined simply, a computer with AI is able to respond to its environment by learning on its own--without humans providing specific instructions. A new report from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, outlines how AI could become more integrated into people's lives by 2030, and recommends how best to regulate it and make sure its benefits are shared equally. Here are five examples--some from this report--of AI technology that could become a part of our lives by 2030. Smart traffic lights using artificial intelligence technology to learn and adapt to traffic patterns in real time could make intersections safer and more efficient.

Alicia Vikander in "Ex Machina," a sci-fi thriller about an eccentric inventor who designs artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is all about getting a machine to mimic a human in every way: thought, speech, movement. That's why one of the tests for AI is the Turing test: whether a robot can fool a human into thinking it is conversing with another of its own species. An integral part of accomplishing this is making the AI recognize human emotions. So one research lab is working on the next iteration of virtual assistants, those that can recognize and react to emotional cues.

It's hard to put your finger on why, but the voices our computers use to speak just sound wrong. Even with the best voice programming, like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, computers sound--well--robotic when they talk. But that could change soon. Neural networks are now tackling the problem of making computer speech sound more natural, filling sentences with nonverbal sounds like lip smacks, breath intakes, and irregular pauses. DeepMind, an Alphabet-owned world leader in artificial intelligence research, recently published a blog post about WaveNet, a convolutional neural network (like DeepDream) that can reduce the performance gap between computer and human speech by about 50%, researchers say.