Back in December, when Slack integrations launched, I wrote Clippy's Revenge about the potential of "smart messaging" to become a new platform. Since then, big players have done much to nurture that possibility -- as if on some secret, jointly agreed-upon master schedule. This looks like the battleground of the next tech war, and all eyes are on Apple this week. But how much of the bot craze is hype, and what's worth paying attention to? The frenetic energy around this emerging ecosystem is well-placed, but often confusing. After meeting 50 founders in this space, I'd like to offer a structured explanation of the emerging Conversational Economy, and propose some opportunities (for both big companies and startups).

There are a few places where you can find Siri in macOS, and each feels intuitive. For starters, you'll find the familiar purple Siri shortcut in the Dock, right next to Finder. That lower-left corner is the same place we already expect to find Cortana on Windows 10. If you like, though, Siri also lives in the tray, in the upper-right area of the screen, right next to where the search bar already lives. Or -- and this is my personal favorite -- you can use the keyboard shortcut Fn-spacebar to bring it up without using your cursor.

Last week, at the annual news extravaganza/coding demo/Beats 1 jam sesh that is WWDC, Apple launched a new version of its desktop operating system. There was a funny slide about naming conventions, another California-centric name (Sierra) and a bunch of new features. And Craigy With The Good Hair announced a small but long overdue change: Mac OS X is now called macOS. One day after the event, not two minutes after booting up a MacBook Pro that Apple pre-loaded with a preview build of macOS Sierra, I asked Siri some existential questions. Then I asked which version of OS X she was running, expecting a gentle chiding about macOS and silly questions.

Despite what science-fiction wisdom says, talking to your computer is not normal. Sitting in the middle of a modern, open floor-plan office and saying "Hello, Computer," will garner some head-turns and a few scowls. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple are convinced we want to talk to everything, including our desktop and laptop computers. Which brings us to today. Almost a year since Microsoft brought Cortana to Windows 10, Apple is following suit with Siri for the newly rechristened macOS.

This fall, Mac users will have a lot to get excited about in the macOS Sierra update. The latest version of Apple's desktop operating system has a new name (more on that below) and a slew of new features, including Siri on the desktop, better iCloud Drive support and snazzy features like a universal clipboard and better storage optimization. We've had some time to spend with macOS Sierra -- which will be available in public beta later this summer -- and have some thoughts about where Apple is going with the Mac. The same core Mac features and OS X interface you know and are familiar with are here. Still, Apple has added a number of new features that make this a compelling upgrade, especially if you're an user. The version of macOS Sierra we're looking at is still a developer preview, so there are some bugs and unfinished features, which is why this isn't a review per se. But we have a good sense of what users can expect this fall. At WWDC 2016, Apple unveiled what was one of its worst-kept secrets, OS X (née Mac OS X) was being renamed macOS. As Craig Federighi intimated onstage, it just didn't make sense to have iOS, tvOS and watchOS alongside an operating system named OS X.

From Siri to photo memories, here are five new features of the MacOS Sierra, coming to the public as a beta in July. NEW YORK--Siri evaded my question for what took Apple's voice assistant so long to get onto the Mac. "Who, me?" responds the voice familiar to anyone who uses an iPhone. However tardy Siri's arrival, the debut of Apple's loquacious personal helper on the company's computers is arguably the most welcome new feature coming to Macs that will be running macOS Sierra. Sierra is the latest iteration of Apple's operating system for its PCs and is the first version in years without the OS X moniker.

For most, the term Artificial Intelligence evokes thoughts of futuristic technologies, of C-3PO and Asimov's "I,Robot." We think of walking, sentient robots that look like us – or at least we imagine they appear like us. What we don't generally think of is a glorified speakerbox, or a supercomputer tasked to create recipes. But that's where AI starts – with small steps and incremental advances in technology. These small steps gradually lead to giant leaps forward; think of a narrow canyon off in the distance: you're pretty sure you can jump the canyon, but first you need to get there.

Are artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics just the latest trendy buzzwords, or is the technology about to transform the enterprise? We spoke to IBM, Microsoft, Insidesales.com, Google and SAP to find out. The world's biggest tech companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI): software that can learn to think and solve problems in a human-like way. According to Deloitte: "By end-2016 more than 80 of the world's 100 largest enterprise software companies by revenues will have integrated cognitive technologies into their products."

Both Apple and Amazon now allow third parties to build their own brand-specific voice technologies on their respective products, Siri and Echo. These are huge steps forward in artificial intelligence (AI) based conversational interfaces or'chatbots' that will make computing a more effortless and intuitive part of our world. Microsoft was also recently in the news, but not in the way they had hoped. Their release of a chatbot named Tay, an AI designed to become smarter as more users interacted with it, was hijacked to spout hate speech. Microsoft created Tay to learn how AI programs could interact with users in casual conversation and, over time, learn from that interaction--just like people do.

Most accurate recommender systems are black-box models, hiding the reasoning behind their recommendations. Yet explanations have been shown to increase the user's trust in the system in addition to providing other benefits such as scrutability, meaning the ability to verify the validity of recommendations. This gap between accuracy and transparency or explainability has generated an interest in automated explanation generation methods. Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) are accurate models for CF that also lack interpretability. In this paper, we focus on RBM based collaborative filtering recommendations, and further assume the absence of any additional data source, such as item content or user attributes. We thus propose a new Explainable RBM technique that computes the top-n recommendation list from items that are explainable. Experimental results show that our method is effective in generating accurate and explainable recommendations.