As far back as I can remember, artificial intelligence (AI) was always going to be the next big thing to revolutionize the way we live and work. Funny thing is, that's still true. And yet, at this week's Code Conference, AI was the hot subject for CEOs of Amazon, Google and IBM. Which begs the question, is AI finally real, or is it destined to remain the perpetual technology of the future? I'll never forget how cool it was to watch the crew of Discovery One engage in witty dialog with the Hal 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The voice revolution is going to disrupt financial institutions and banking. This is simple, because with the rise of mobile banking, consumer voice interactions with chat-bots are going to be the most natural and most seamless communication method. How virtual personal assistants (VPAs) scale now, goes very quickly and how banking, and other huge institutions work, is about to change on a radical level. Interactive voice response (IVR) systems have been around for a while, but what if they were smarter, much smarter. As they can now learn in real-time about our needs, with a complete history of all of our interactions, the banking chat-bots will be able to personalize services to us at a level that will soon exceed the ability of a human customer service agent.

At Recode's Code conference this year, it was all about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Leading executives from major tech companies all predicted how disruptive self-aware computers would become in the short term future. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla said humans need to put in neural laces, or USB cables into human brains to keep up with artificial intelligence. This seems to be more like the Pandoran neural network than any of the machines we know of that exist today. Musk also said that there was only one company that had truly disruptive artificial intelligence companies, but did not name the company directly.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says he believes his company's artificial intelligence is smarter than Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, but we're seeing only 1% of its potential. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says his company's artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts are ahead of the competition's, but there's still a long way to go before full potential is reached. "It's still early days for all of us," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Walt Mossberg on Wednesday at the Code Conference, where Pichai also discussed Android, messaging, and VR.

In today's digital era everything is cognitive, down to our personal cellular phones. Smartphones use voice recognition to give us answers to all of our questions in an instant. When you ask Siri a question, she goes and finds the answer for you, and in just seconds you have the information you need. But in the not-so-distant future, those answers will include more than just information. The next step will be an instant action that prompts you with additional questions such as: "Would you like to buy this TV now and at the best price available?"

Part of Microsoft Accelerator's batch 3 of startups, DefinedCrowd is filling a niche in the big data and machine learning community, providing near-real-time feeds of rich language data, checked by actual well-informed humans all over the world. The need comes from the Catch-22 that often arrests deep data analysis, in that you have to understand the data to analyze it, but you must analyze it to understand it. The vast landscape of the spoken and written word and its big data counterpart in natural language processing is especially troublesome in this way. "In the artificial intelligence space, to develop virtual assistants like Cortana, or Apple's Siri and things like that, you need large amounts of voice recordings, you need transcriptions of those voices, you need intents and empathy labeling of those voices," said Daniela Braga, co-founder and chief scientist, in an interview with TechCrunch. "The crowd input provides the extra refinement of the data that basically no machine can do."

Amazon's assistant Alexa will make its way to the Pebble Core. Just last week the Kickstarter smartwatch company Pebble announced a revamp to its entire product line. The Pebble 2 and Pebble Time 2 welcomed the Pebble Core: a portable Spotify player with smartphone internals and no screen. The device was meant for music-lovers, of course, but also for tinkerers: Because it runs Android, developing apps for the Core could extend its functionality to allow for some interesting uses. Now, Pebble itself is adding in a feature that makes the Core even more useful: Amazon's Alexa voice assistant will come to the portable media player.

When Siri originally launched on the iPhone a little over four years ago, we postulated that it would be a world-changing event. A personal assistant in our pockets that could handle real-world requests felt like the future. When it launched onto the Apple Watch, it was described as potentially being the quickest and most fun way to interact with the wearable. Then when it came to the Apple TV, it became the fastest way to disseminate the content you want to watch across multiple apps. Siri has found its way onto nearly every hero Apple product today, and yet on every device it feels as though it has its own definitive personality.

On Thursday at the Recode Code Conference in Los Angeles, Tinder CEO Sean Rad announced that the dating app has plans to make its services more inclusive to transgender and gender nonconforming communities. Tinder -- which has been accused of having a transphobia problem -- will be "working with leading LGBTQ experts and organizations, including GLAAD, to help them address these needs and continue revolutionizing the ways by which ALL people, across the globe, connect," according to a statement from Tinder's PR team. One challenge we face at Tinder is making sure our tens of millions of users around the world have the same user experience. No matter who you are, no matter what you're looking for, you should get quality matches through the Tinder experience. There's an important transgender (and gender nonconforming) community on Tinder who haven't had that experience... yet.

The tech industry is obsessed with its hunt for finding the next big thing after the smartphone. Last year, it was wearables, like the Apple Watch and FitBit. Each one of those was supposed to change the the way we interact with technology. And each one of those has failed to deliver so far. There's still a sliver of hope for some of those, I guess.