"[Artificial intelligence] is the most exciting thing going on right now -- it's the holy grail that anyone in computer science has been thinking about," Bill Gates said on stage at Vox Media's Code Conference on Wednesday. Speech recognition and computer vision have seen more progress in the last five years than ever before. But Melinda said that stats around women in computer science are troubling: Only 17% of computer science graduates today are women, down from a peak of 37%. "We ought to care more about women being in computer science," she said. "You need women participating in these things." If women aren't active in the space, it will influence the things that artificial intelligence research is conducted around and applied to, she reasoned.

The latest Internet Trends report by Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker contains some bad very bad news for Apple and some exquisite news for Amazon, all in a single slide. On the left is the prediction that iPhone unit shipments will fall by around 11 percent during 2016 (actual figures are on an earlier slide), the first time since its release that Apple's flagship device has suffered a drop in sales. All this while Android is expected to see shipments grown by 7 percent. On the right are estimated sales for Amazon's Echo voice-powered home assistant, which are projected to have topped 1 million during Q1 of 2016 (Amazon is tight-lipped when it comes to hardware sales). Driving devices such as the Echo are the consumer benefits.

SAY it out loud and the machines will know. Search engines are moving beyond the web and into the messy real world. Every call into or out of US prisons is recorded. It can be important to know what's being said, because some inmates use phones to conduct illegal business on the outside. But the recordings generate huge quantities of audio that are prohibitively expensive to monitor with human ears.

There's Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Echo who serve as digital assistants in the home. Don't hold your breath for IBM's Watson to make an appearance anytime soon. IBM would prefer Watson, which garnered the spotlight when it competed -- and bested -- two "Jeopardy" champs on the popular television game show, to remain open so others could build devices and products that take advantage of its intelligence, said IBM CEO Ginny Rometty. Still, she believes artificial intelligence will have a big impact down the line. "There's no doubt in my mind that cognitive AI will impact everything in our lives in five years," Rometty said on Wednesday at Re/Code's Code conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California.

If the battle between rival digital assistants can be summed up by the NBA championships, then Google's take would be the Golden State Warriors? That's assuming, of course, the record-setting Warriors beat the Cleveland Cavaliers to defend their NBA title. It's the analogy used by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who characterized the competition as more friendly than bloody. "This is not like'Game of Thrones,'" he said Wednesday at Recode's Code conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California. Artificial intelligence is already a hot topic at the conference, and it's a big part of Google's future.

In-home robots to help with everything from cooking and cleaning to childcare and companionship have been the stuff of sci-fi for decades. But, with the unveiling this week of the Wall-E-like Asus Zenbo, this is the year that science-fiction could turn into science-fact, introducing home assistants that can talk to you, control your electronics and help out with the chores. Here are five that could be knocking at your door in the near future. The latest robot to offer help around the home is Asus's Zenbo, which, at 599 ( 410), costs about the same as a smartphone. Designed to be a do-it-all smarthome assistant, Zenbo can drive itself around your place, using various cameras to keep it from bumping into the walls.

On an unseasonably hot Wednesday at the end of May, a little voice in my head was telling me to run faster. "It's time to get your heart rate up," she told me. This wasn't my inner masochist, like it usually is. On this particular run, it was the voice of Vi, a digital assistant baked inside a pair of prototype in-ear headphones. Vi is the first consumer product from wearable technology company LifeBeam, which has provided the tech backbone for products from Samsung, Under Armour, and JBL, among others.

Picture this: At every step of a patient's trip through the hospital, a virtual assistant awaits, ready to answer questions, pull up medical records -- or snap photos during surgery. Hospital staff and patients walked through that futuristic hospital scenario one recent afternoon at a new simulation center at Boston Children's Hospital. Fifty people came to dream up ways that Amazon's Alexa voice-recognition software program could help in the clinic and at home. The hospital dove into voice-assisted software last month, when it released an Alexa-based app called KidsMD that gives parents advice when their children catch a fever. Children's "is leading the way when it comes to hands-free work in hospitals" using Alexa, an Amazon spokeswoman said.

Last month, the Washington Post reported on a surprising new job in Silicon Valley: bot-writer. "Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools," the Post's Elizabeth Dwoskin wrote. These personalities, Dwoskin reported, will soon be joined by more specialized bots developed by other companies, among them Sophie and Molly, "nurse avatars" that talk to patients about their medical conditions. There's even a "guru avatar" in development, designed to teach meditation. These products are exciting and futuristic--just a decade ago, the possibility of conversing with a computer program seemed like science fiction.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is very bullish on his company's artificial intelligence push. So bullish, in fact, that Amazon has invested four years of research into its key project in AI -- and stacked that project with a sizable staff. Bezos said at the Code Conference that the team on Alexa, Amazon's smart voice-assistant software, and Echo, its flagship device, is now more than 1,000 employees. "We've been working behind the scenes for the last four years," he said about Echo and Alexa. Other tech giants are moving into the space.