In the latest attempt to fulfill sci-fi movie fantasies, tech firms have been lining up to provide you with a virtual assistant. From well-known voice-powered AIs such as Apple's Siri to upstarts like Viv, the goal is to quicken the actions you already take on your phone and other devices, growing ever-more efficient at the job by learning from your behavior. But like any hired help, each of these AI assistants has different skills, blind spots, and quirks. Bio: A voice-driven assistant that talks back to you--invoked by long-pressing the iPhone or iPad home button--and proactively recommends actions to take. Recently took up residence on Apple TV and Apple Watch.

For all the buzz over conversational bots these days, they're still pretty crude, as some users of Facebook Messenger's new chatbots recently discovered. It's not necessarily that they're dumb, but they do need to be trained to respond intelligently in the specific situations in which they're employed. Today MindMeld Inc., one of the pioneers behind conversational artificial intelligence technology, will roll out a version of its bot platform specifically for retailers and e-commerce companies. MindMeld for Commerce is intended to help customers find products, do messaging-based transactions, check on order status and get support without requiring another human to get involved. Tuttle contends that MindMeld's bots can converse, either in text or by voice, better not only than other bots but also virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana.

As developers, we adapt as technologies move from the realm of Science Fiction into readily available SDKs. In the past 5 years, devices have become more personal and demanding of new forms of interaction. In Windows 10, speech is front-and-center with the Cortana personal assistant, and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) gives us several ways to plug into that "Hey, Cortana" experience. But there's much more that we can do when working with speech from a UWP app and that's true whether working locally on the device or remotely via the cloud. In this 3-part series, we will dig in to some of those speech capabilities and show that speech can be both a powerful and a relatively easy addition to an app.

Google is about to hold its biggest show of the year. And we've got a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. The company holds its I/O conference every summer to show off the biggest updates to developers and let them get their hands on its newest products. And this year that's going to be the technology that will power your house, take over your wallet and create the reality that you live in – as well as the now relatively small matter of powering your phone. Google I/O runs from 18 May to 20 May.

In 2016, you'll hear a lot about bots. They've been around for nearly the entirety of the Internet. Mostly, bots have been used for malicious reasons. Heck, a quick Wikipedia search reveals more about malicious purposes than anything else. A bot is essentially a piece of code, or software, that runs automated tasks.

Amazon Fire TV is beefing up its Alexa voice features. You could already use the voice remote with Amazon's Fire TV and Fire Stick devices to ask Alexa to search for TV shows and movies. Amazon Fire TV owners will soon be able to ask Alexa to search for -- and get information from -- local movie theaters, restaurants and other businesses, as well as ask the voice-enabled virtual assistant for programming on HBO Go, Hulu, Showtime and other apps. Owners of Fire TV devices (Fire Stick, 49.99; Fire TV, 99.99) will get the new Alexa features automatically via free software upgrades in the coming weeks, Amazon says. "Customers have told us they love having the convenience of Alexa on their Amazon Fire TV," said Tim Twerdahl, General Manager, Amazon Fire TV.

Artificial intelligence is already getting close, and we may be even closer with Snips, a mobile AI company from the collective minds of three Ph.D.'s. Today, the company launched its AI platform for iOS, claiming to be the only technology of its kind that is "private by design." While technology's primary goal seems to be making our lives easier, that convenience often seems to come at the price of security. But with Snips, the founders say that the platform's design ensures that a user's personal data never leaves their device, and more importantly, that no one -- including Snips -- can collect any sensitive information. This means that the user and the user alone has full control of his or her data. The platform is meant to mimic the human brain, drawing inspiration from the way in which our memory stores information.

French startup Snips is launching its first product today, an iOS app that is supposed to make your life easier by letting you view and search your data more easily. Snips is a personal assistant that helps you know where you need to be and when. When you first launch the app, Snips wants you to grant access to your location, calendars, contacts, motion sensor and Gmail account.

French startup Snips is launching its first product today, an iOS app that is supposed to make your life easier by letting you view and search your data more easily. Snips is a personal assistant that helps you know where you need to be and when. When you first launch the app, Snips wants you to grant access to your location, calendars, contacts, motion sensor and Gmail account. Then you're good to go. The main screen shows a tiny map at the top, a search bar in the middle and a list of events at the bottom.

At Retail Assist, we understand the importance of always having one eye on technology, in order to stay ahead of the curve. We've been researching the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to bring you our opinion on consumer adoption of AI. In the news recently, we've noticed that the makers of Apple's iconic digital assistant, Siri, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, have released a new AI platform, Viv. The key difference between their "next generation" tool and other AI platforms is that it isn't constrained by service provider, i.e. Being cross channel, it can "speak" in a device agnostic manner to vendors and third party suppliers in order to provide the most relevant information based on the request, i.e. to purchase relevant goods at the cheapest price.