The assistant wars are in full swing, with Google Assistant and Viv entering the fray and existing players such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Hound and Google's Now all stepping up fight for consumers' hearts and minds. Apple's rumored Amazon Echo competitor, which VentureBeat believes is a next-gen Apple TV, could blow all the assistants out of the water when it comes to deciphering complex natural language queries. And powering it--VocalIQ, a sophisticate technology Apple acquired back in October 2015. Tech Insider provided an in-depth overview of how VocalIQ could make Siri a lot smarter than it is today. Tech Insider's piece, titled "Apple is working on an AI system that wipes the floor with Google and everyone else," notes that Apple had been testing VocalIQ technology against Siri, Google Now and Cortana. "Users asked each AI questions using normal language, not the robotic commands you're used to using with digital assistants," reads the article.

'Find a nearby Chinese restaurant with open parking and WiFi that's kid-friendly.' We're not sending you on an arbitrary mission like Challenge Anneka – the new Siri is due for an upgrade and it's promised to be scarily precise. Apple has snapped up a small team in Cambridge who are developing VocalIQ – a more robust and capable version of Siri, reports Business Insider UK. The new system is expected to be much more robust and capable than the Siri we know and love. And it's been put through its paces in a series of tests against the likes of Google Now, Cortana and Siri (of course).

Asus has just unveiled what's likely to be the most talked about product at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, a cute talking robot for the home priced at 599. Called Zenbo, Asus pitched it as a personal assistant that can help look after elderly relatives or read stories to the kids, but that might be selling it a bit short. The robot is about two feet high and rolls around on wheels, with a display that can show its animated face or be used for other things like making video calls and streaming movies. Asus Chairman Jonney Shih demonstrated Zenbo at a press conference in Taipei Monday, giving it voice commands and asking it questions is it rolled around the stage. "Hey Zenbo, is it true you can take pictures"?

Paradoxically, even as they open new windows on nature and human behaviour, learning algorithms themselves have remained shrouded in mystery. Hardly a day goes by without a story in the media involving machine learning, whether it's a tech company launching a virtual personal assistant; Google's AlphaGo beating the human Go champion; US retailer Target finding out a teenager is pregnant before her parents do; or the US National Security Agency (NSA) looking for dots to connect. But in each case the learning algorithm driving the story is a black box. Even books on big data skirt around what really happens when the computer swallows all those terabytes and magically comes up with new insights. At best, we're left with the impression that learning algorithms just find correlations between pairs of events, such as Googling "flu medicine" and having the flu.

Asus has just unveiled what's likely to be the most talked about product at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, a cute talking robot for the home priced at 599. Called Zenbo, Asus pitched it as a personal assistant that can help look after elderly relatives or read stories to the kids, but that might be selling it a bit short. The robot is about two feet high and rolls around on wheels, with a display that can show its animated face or be used for other things like making video calls and streaming movies. Asus Chairman Jonney Shih demonstrated Zenbo at a press conference in Taipei Monday, giving it voice commands and asking it questions is it rolled around the stage. "Hey Zenbo, is it true you can take pictures"?

Microsoft's last version of Windows is finally here: Windows 10 is arguably the best version of the ubiquitous operating system. But the question is, should you upgrade for free immediately? Or will it be another Windows 8 moment? Windows 10 is a big step towards the Microsoft classic becoming an always-connected operating system for every device, not just PCs, which is continuously updated for free. It'll run traditional desktop Windows apps, like Windows 7.

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are capable of radically disrupting the way we search for and consume information on the Internet. The convergence of several trends and technologies has resulted in a new interface through which people will be able to interact with your business. This will have a dramatic impact -- if your long-term marketing/business plan doesn't account for IPAs, you may be in the same boat as those people who said they didn't need a website in the early 2000s. If we look to pre/early Internet, then the primary interface to most businesses was the humble phone. Over the phone you could speak to a business and find out what they had in stock, when they'd be open, whether they had space for your reservation, etc., and then you could go on to order products, ask for directions, or place reservations.

Asus has just unveiled what's likely to be the most talked about product at this week's Computex trade show in Taipei, a cute talking robot for the home priced at US 599. Called Zenbo, Asus pitched it as a personal assistant that can help look after elderly relatives or read stories to the kids, but that might be selling it a bit short. The robot is about two feet high and rolls around on wheels, with a display that can show its animated face or be used for other things like making video calls and streaming movies. Asus Chairman Jonney Shih demonstrated Zenbo at a press conference in Taipei Monday, giving it voice commands and asking it questions is it rolled around the stage. "Hey Zenbo, is it true you can take pictures"?

Spanish AI personal assistant app Sherpa has raised 6.5 million in a Series A funding round from Alma Mundi Innvierte Fund FCRE and a number of private investors. The Bilbao-based startup creates an app billed as a Predictive Personal Assistant that searches for and presents content that it has learned the user likes. The company claims that it intends to take Google and Apple head on in the space for intelligent PA apps. It recently signed a deal with Samsung that will see its app included as standard on the tech giant's latest devices. The new funds from this Series A round will be used by Sherpa to bolster its distribution, it said.

An Indian artist has been illustrating the real-life experiences of Tinder users in the country on Instagram and Facebook. Called the #100IndianTinderTales, the project crowdsources candid and intimate stories of love, desire and fleeting encounters. Indu Harikumar, an illustrator and writer from Mumbai, began the '100 Indian Tinder Tales' project in April after trying out the app, first during a visit to Vienna, and then back home. She started with her own experiences and those of her friends, but the project grew into an attempt to "document urban desire without any sort of judgement" and to understand how other people navigated Tinder. "I am interested in people's stories, what makes them tick, their fears, their aspirations, how they overcome things," Harikumar told Mashable.