Despite originally debuting as a simplistic walkie-talkie-styled app, Roger aspires to deliver more than voice messaging. It's poised to offer the Alexa Voice Service to mobile users regardless if they own an Amazon Echo or Alexa-enabled device. This means you'll be able to, organize your calendar, control gadgets in your smart home, and perform a whole host of other Alexa-initiated actions simply by using Roger. While Alexa is the most impressive name when talking third-party apps here, Dropbox and Slack support is nothing to sneeze at, especially when you consider how many messages or notes can pass through either service in a daily basis. As far as functionality goes, you can even use Roger at present to redirect missed phone calls into the app to create "voice conversations."

Chances are the entity managing your favorite smartphone app or Internet service isn't a person. Algorithms are setting the price of your airline ticket and hailing your Uber driver. And we're only at the beginning of a transition that is going to make the algorithms behind the software people interact with better able to understand and react to humans, technologists at a gathering of Seattle's burgeoning artificial-intelligence industry said Wednesday. "Every application that is going to get built, starting today and into the future, is going to be an intelligent app," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, a venture partner with Madrona Venture Group and a former Microsoft executive. The event, hosted by Somasegar's Seattle-based venture-capital firm, was held to highlight the cluster of companies in the region working on the cutting edge of intelligent software, including in the discipline dubbed machine learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is something of a buzz-phrase across the tech industry these days - but Microsoft's Dave Coplin says that it will come to have a profound impact on society as we know it. In his words, AI "will change everything". Coplin, the company's chief envisioning officer in the UK, was speaking a few days ago at an AI conference in London, where he described it as "the most important technology that anybody on the planet is working on today." "This technology will change how we relate to technology," he said. "It will change how we relate to each other. I would argue that it will even change how we perceive what it means to be human."

Machine learning, a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building, is at the top of the "hype curve" for emerging technologies and is one of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2016, according to Gartner. It's safe to say that most of us are already interacting with machine learning applications on a daily basis whether it's Apple's Siri, Facebook's face detection, Netflix personalized recommendations, or iOS's autocorrect. And from a business perspective, basically any organization that gathers data with the intention of acting on it can benefit from machine learning. But what can we learn from this growing trend? What can we do with such a widely applicable technology and how can we maximize its potential?

With the creators of Siri offering up a new personal assistant that won't just tell you what pizza is but can order one for you, artificial intelligence is showing a huge leap forward. Viv is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform built by Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, the creators of the AI behind Apple's Siri, the most well-known digital assistant in the world.

Interestingly, Nest (now a part of the same company) shied away from the idea of an Echo like device, citing privacy concerns about talking to Google, its search engine, algorithms and other internet magicks. Recode's sources suggest voice search and intelligent responses from your Google devices will be the centerpiece of Google's showcase, alongside virtual reality developments. Show us what you've got.

Artificial intelligence is already powering your Google searches, your Netflix recommendations, and your smartphone's virtual assistant. It is playing humans at complex, intuitive games like Go, and it is beating them. Now, researchers say, they want AI to power your doctor's diagnoses, your drug prescriptions, and your smartphone's virtual psychologist. They want AI to perform tasks that radiologists do, and at least match them. Machine learning has made tremendous strides in the last decade, becoming one of the fastest-growing, most-hyped areas of computer science.

Eric Poindessault is founder and CEO at Biggerpan. From HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Samantha in Spike Jonze's Her, for decades we have been obsessed with the idea that artificial intelligence powered-computers will one day be able to interact with people, follow spoken instructions and make decisions independently, like a human would. Since Siri hit our screens on the iPhone 4, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Baidu have entered the playing field, too. But while each new generation brings its lot of interesting new features or use cases, they are still far off from the AI representations in movies. It's hard to imagine anyone engaging in a romantic relationship with Siri, or NASA putting Alexa in control of a spacecraft just yet. Movies have set the bar pretty high, and we are still waiting for such ubiquitous voice-controlled AI assistants to enter the real world.

The creators of Apple's artificial intelligence assistant, Siri, have come out with a new product, Viv, which can handle more complicated tasks and partner with third party sites. Ordering things online is definitely going to become a helluva lot easier. Siri is great and all, but she's got some flaws (sorry baby). Most of what she can do is Google search things for you, which is helpful, but also not spectacular with a boat load of other requests. For instance, what if you wanted to order some flowers for your mom on Mother's Day? Siri wouldn't be able to do that since it doesn't play well with external sites.

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