If you look at all the tech giants - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon - there is one area all of them are keenly interested in. Personal assistants and bots which work on the basis of artificial intelligence (AI). Admittedly, Apple, Google and Microsoft have been in this space for a couple of years, but 2016 is the year when these technologies could start to have a telling impact on the way people use their gadgets and services. In fact, for many including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, "Bots will be the new apps." More than the biggies, start-ups are doing some unique and disruptive things. On Monday (May 9) night, at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and CEO of Viv, showed his new AI-based personal assistant which seemingly was a step above what Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's Search or even Amazon's Alexa are capable of doing.

Lately, there's been a rumble pretty much everywhere about artificial intelligence, digital personal assistants, the Internet of Things, wearables and apps for everything. I've even written about what the rise of digital assistants means to search. There are some who claim that these new technologies will render search obsolete, passed over for the convenience and joy of an always-available digital world. I think they are wrong. Instead of looking at a search engine as an ad platform, we need to remember what it actually does for people.

Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. It won't take long for Messenger's users to realize M can accomplish much more than your standard digital helper, suspects David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook. "It can perform tasks that none of the others can," Marcus says.

What: Kitt.ai, a Seattle software company specializing in natural language understanding as related to artificial intelligence Ph.D.'s galore: The three co-founders, Yao, Guoguo Chen and Kenji Sagae, all have doctorates in computer-engineering related fields. Yao and Chen studied at Johns Hopkins and Sagae at Carnegie Mellon. The idea: Yao came up with the idea for the company while at Johns Hopkins. He flew to Seattle to interview at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), and told Allen CEO Oren Etzioni he wanted to start his own company. AI2 agreed to incubate the startup, and Kitt.ai was formed.

Accenture has announced a new business unit in partnership with IPsoft focused on spurring adoption of artificial intelligence in the enterprise. The systems integration and outsourcing giant plans to use IPsoft's Amelia AI platform as the core of the new Accenture Amelia practice. Amelia is similar to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, but is touted as more expressive and capable of empathy than her AI peers. Accenture said it will develop a suite of go-to-market strategies and consulting services based off of the Amelia platform. As Accenture CTO Paul Daugherty explained, the point is to appeal to executives who "are overwhelmed by the plethora of technologies and many products that are advertising AI or Cognitive capabilities".

We like to think we've moved past the workplace sexism of the 1950s, when men were professionals and women were secretaries. But while women have managed to break out of those subservient roles, the genders we assign to artificial-intelligence robots suggests our prejudices haven't made as much progress. After law firm BakerHostetler hired an AI "lawyer" named ROSS, journalist Rose Eveleth noted that the male name was somewhat unusual in the world of AI. I would just like to note that all the assistant AIs are given female names, but the lawyer AI is named Ross. Critics have previously noted that most AI assistants--including Apple's Siri, Google Now, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana--sound like women.

In the recent movie "Ex Machina," a young programmer falls in love with a robot. An artificial-intelligence mastermind had engineered his robot so that "she" appears to think, feel and love in a way that was uncannily human. He had also mined and analyzed the young man's online history deeply enough to create the woman of his dreams. Long before anybody actually meets the perfect robot mate, however, intelligent, "learning" machines capable of advanced data analytics will be ever more precise in matching one human to another--and in predicting the success of computer-assisted matchups, which will improve the odds that our real-world romantic relationships will last. Leaps in digital technology have already made drastic changes to 21st century romance.

As video content matures and proliferates and VR content creates new interactive environments and as the way we access software and apps changes and evolves, PVAs or personal virtual assistants will radically influence the interface with the internet and these new layers of content and virtual experience. Viv is just four years old, but by the time IoT and VR matures, she will be ready to make the smart home, smart city and billions of connected devices truly come to life. While we assume it will be one of the tech giants: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft; disruption doesn't usually come from an established player whose interests and investments are scattered. Just as VR represents a new platform of information, content, advertisement, marketing and social media, and digital experiences, VPAs like Viv could represent another springboard to the future.

As an amateur futurist, I'm always looking for how AI and exponential technologies are disrupting human society towards more automated smart cities. As video content matures and proliferates and VR content creates new interactive environments and as the way we access software and apps changes and evolves, PVAs or personal virtual assistants will radically influence the interface with the internet and these new layers of content and virtual experience. The future of PVAs is more like an intelligent OS that acts as a buffer between us and the information noise of the internet. Take your most sophisticated contextual chat bot and marry it with millions of data points per person and algorithms learning from us and how we interact online and in our lives, where we can customize our own experience, and that is a bit like how PVAs may turn out. They will be AI, but truly act as personal virtual assistants.

But artificial intelligence isn't some far-off fantasy imagined by a science fiction film-maker or writers. It's here, and only going to get better. From Stanley Kubrick's HAL 9000 in his 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Samantha, the AI assistant that Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with in Spike Jonze's film Her, humanity has long dreamt of the day it can just talk to its computers. And some very bright people indeed are betting this will be the way we'll all interact with our computers very soon. We've all heard of Siri, of course – Apple's AI assistant, built right into the iPhone and iPad.