Justine Cassell has taken her virtual assistant Sara on a road trip. They're in Tianjin, China, where Carnegie Mellon University's associate dean of technology strategy and impact traveled to offer a glimpse of tomorrow at this week's Annual Meeting of New Champions. Sara, for "socially aware robot assistant," has spent the past several days greeting hundreds of people coming to the event, hosted by the World Economic Forum, at a station showcasing the office of the future. A life-size face and torso on a big-screen TV, Sara served as the front end to the event app. That presentation might make you think of Max Headroom, the stuttering AI character from the 1980s show.

NEW YORK--The first-year anniversary of the Windows 10 launch is still about a month away. But Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi announced today in a blog post that the next major iteration of the company's operating system--dubbed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update--will become available on August 2. Microsoft is encouraging folks to request it in advance. Indeed, ahead of July 29, the one-year anniversary launch date, anyone running Windows 10 on a PC today can request the upgrade for free, after which it will cost is 119. Either way, you'll still have to wait until August 2 to get it. Mehdi says that more than 350 million devices are currently running Windows 10 worldwide, with customer satisfaction levels higher than any previous version of Windows.

Microsoft is set to release a new, major update to Windows 10 on Aug. 2 -- just a few days after the system's first anniversary. The company made clear when Windows 10 debuted that the new system would break from the old rhythm of updating -- going years between major upgrades. Instead, the firm said that it would release smaller, but more frequent updates to the system. The company already released a significant upgrade in November, which added some Skype-based messaging apps, features for business and some visual tweaks. The Windows 10 Anniversary update adds a few features, including a major change to the company's voice assistant, Cortana.

Justine Cassell has taken her virtual assistant Sara on a road trip. They're in Tianjin, China, where Carnegie Mellon's associate dean of technology strategy and impact traveled to offer a glimpse of tomorrow at the Annual Meeting of New Champions. Sara, for "socially aware robot assistant," has spent the past several days greeting hundreds of people coming to the event, hosted by the World Economic Forum, at a station showcasing the office of the future. A life-size face and torso on a big-screen TV, Sara served as the front end to the event app. That presentation might make you think of Max Headroom, the stuttering AI character from the 1980s show.

Customer experience personalization is all about data first. Get the data right and you can shape the overall customer experience by applying data science and machine learning. Recommendation engines are very powerful personalization tools because it's a great way to do "discovery" – showing people items they will like, but are unlikely to discover by themselves. They improve a visitor's experience by offering relevant items at the right time and on the right page. In the immortal words of Steve Jobs - "a lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

NEW YORK--The first-year anniversary of the Windows 10 launch is still about a month away. But Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi announced today in a blog post that the next major iteration of the company's operating system--dubbed the Windows 10 Anniversary Update--will become available on August 2. Microsoft is encouraging folks to request it in advance. Indeed, ahead of July 29, the one-year anniversary launch date, anyone running Windows 10 on a PC today can request the upgrade for free, after which it will cost is 119. Either way, you'll still have to wait until August 2 to get it. Mehdi says that more than 350 million devices are currently running Windows 10 worldwide, with customer satisfaction levels higher than any previous version of Windows.

Microsoft wants you to think of Windows 10 as a service, where new features arrive as they're ready, and where regular updates are themselves a feature. That's true in a sense, but Windows 10 is still Windows, a big and sprawling tangle of code that carries an implicit promise of backward compatibility. The "as a feature" part just means more frequent upgrades, which are now called "feature updates" to distinguish themselves from the cumulative monthly "quality updates." On July 29, Windows 10 celebrates the first anniversary of its release. Four days later, on August 2, a new upgrade - sorry, I mean feature update - will begin rolling out to the 350 million or so devices already running Windows 10.

Microsoft's latest major refresh of Windows 10 will be released publicly on August 2, the company confirmed Wednesday morning. In a blog post, Microsoft outlined the full list of new features coming with the update, including security upgrades, improvements to Cortana and features aimed at making touchscreen devices with Windows 10 more useful. The news comes almost a year after the consumer launch of Windows 10, which has been one of the company's major turning points under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella. The operating system has seen massive (if, at times, unintentional) adoption by both business and consumer users in that time, and these upgrades may further spur adoption across those markets as well. With the launch of the Anniversary Update, users will now be able to do more with Cortana, the Microsoft virtual assistant that shipped with the operating system last year.

Fifteen years ago, when the time became ripe for post-PC devices that put a premium on integrating software and hardware, Apple was the best-positioned company to lead the charge -- and it did. The company's vertical integration, its attention to detail and innovation in both software and hardware and its willingness to make big bets gave it an edge. And it used that edge to reel off its now-familiar string of game-changing products like the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air and the iPad. Now, the iPod is essentially gone, and the other products are in mature or maturing markets, with either pretty flat or dropping sales. And the tech industry is turning to a new battlefield: Artificial intelligence, spread across many devices.

YOU heard it here first. When it comes to navigating information, headphones may be about to put screens in the shade. A handful of start-ups are creating devices which promise to transform not only how you hear the world, but also the way you interface with the gadgets in your life. Here One, launched this week by New York firm Doppler Labs, is one example. Looking like a pair of outsized earplugs, it samples the audio environment and plays back an augmented version. Using a smartphone, users can tweak the levels of individual sounds – adjusting the bass and treble at a concert, for example – or silence intrusive noises such as traffic and wailing infants.