On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage in a crowded auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the audience was soon buzzing about: Siri, a virtual assistant. Scott Forstall, then Apple's head of software, pushed an iPhone button to summon Siri and prodded it with questions. At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris ("8:16 p.m.," Siri replied), defined the word "mitosis" ("Cell division in which the nucleus divides into nuclei containing the same number of chromosomes," it said) and pulled up a list of 14 highly rated Greek restaurants, five of them in Palo Alto, Calif. "I've been in the A.I. field for a long time, and this still blows me away," Mr. Forstall said.

On a rainy Tuesday in San Francisco, Apple executives took the stage to a packed auditorium to unveil the fifth-generation iPhone. The phone, which looked identical to the previous version, had a new feature that the public was quick to comment: Siri, a virtual assistant. Scott Forstall, then Apple's chief software officer, pressed a button on the iPhone to call Siri and asked questions. At his request, Siri checked the time in Paris ("20:16," Siri replied), defined the word "mitosis" ("Cell division in which the nucleus is divided into nuclei containing the same number of chromosomes," he said) and has published a list of 14 Greek restaurants highly regarded, five of them in Palo Alto, California. "I've been in the field of artificial intelligence for a long time and it continues to amaze me," Forstall says.

Companies from Meta to Home Depot are flooding earnings calls with commentary about their artificial intelligence efforts. Ever since OpenAI's ChatGPT lit up the internet in November, companies can't stop talking about artificial intelligence. Take this earnings season so far: References to AI and related terms during calls with investors are already up 77% from a year earlier. AI-hungry investors have propelled Nvidia Corp., which makes the chips needed for complex AI computing tasks, into the best-performing stock among mega-caps this year. Relatively obscure firms with AI in their names have also skyrocketed.

The world's first generative AI-powered search engine is here, and it's in love with you. Or it thinks you're kind of like Hitler. Or it's gaslighting you into thinking it's still 2022, a more innocent time when generative AI seemed more like a cool party trick than a powerful technology about to be unleashed on a world that might not be ready for it. If you feel like you've been hearing a lot about generative AI, you're not wrong. After a generative AI tool called ChatGPT went viral a few months ago, it seems everyone in Silicon Valley is trying to find a use for this new technology. Generative AI is essentially a more advanced and useful version of the conventional artificial intelligence that already helps power everything from autocomplete to Siri.

As a child of the '80s, I can divide my life cleanly into Before Google and After Google. Right around the turn of the millennium, the internet stopped being a tangled thicket of incomplete lists of weird stuff and became a useful research database. Ever since, Google Search has been one of the only technological constants of my adult life, persisting through the rise of smartphones, social media, streaming services, and even drone-based burrito delivery (also, what happened to that?). In all that time, nobody has been able to challenge Google's role as gatekeeper to the cornucopia of digital abundance. More than 90 percent of internet users around the world use Google to shop, navigate, and satisfy their curiosity about pretty much everything.

This report covers results from the 15th "Future of the Internet" canvassing that Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center have conducted together to gather expert views about important digital issues. This is a nonscientific canvassing based on a nonrandom sample; this broad array of opinions about the potential influence of current trends may lead between 2022 and 2035 represents only the points of view of the individuals who responded to the queries. Pew Research Center and Elon's Imagining the Internet Center sampled from a database of experts to canvass from a wide range of fields, inviting entrepreneurs, professionals and policy people based in government bodies, nonprofits and foundations, technology businesses and think tanks, as well as interested academics and technology innovators. The predictions reported here came in response to a set of questions in an online canvassing conducted between June 29 and Aug. 8, 2022. In all, 540 technology innovators and developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded in some way to the question covered in this report. More on the methodology underlying this canvassing and the participants can be found in the section titled "About this canvassing of experts." Advances in the internet, artificial intelligence (AI) and online applications have allowed humans to vastly expand their capabilities and increase their capacity to tackle complex problems. These advances have given people the ability to instantly access and share knowledge and amplified their personal and collective power to understand and shape their surroundings. Today there is general agreement that smart machines, bots and systems powered mostly by machine learning and artificial intelligence will quickly increase in speed and sophistication between now and 2035.

Josh.ai, an artificial intelligence (AI) firm headquartered in San Francisco, California, is working on a prototype integration utilizing OpenAI's ChatGPT structure. Josh.ai is well-recognized for creating a voice-controlled home automation system, as reported by Business Insider. These days, you can ask Siri or Alexa to do things like turn on the lights, give you the temp readings in your bedroom, or play a certain video or music. Otherwise, you may be asked, "Which of the 15 devices you have designated lights would you want to operate?" or "It is now 53 degrees in Kathmandu." But what if your voice assistant is not only able to provide accurate responses but also able to give smart solutions to vague questions?

"It's a new day for search," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said today. For 13 years now, Microsoft has tried to get you to use Bing, but you didn't want to, so its global market share remains in the low single digits. Now, the company is pulling out all the stops in an effort to better compete with Google. Today, at a press event in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft announced its long-rumored integration of OpenAI's GPT-4 model into Bing, providing a ChatGPT-like experience within the search engine. The company is also launching a new version of its Edge browser today, with these new AI features built into the sidebar.

However, emotional information leaked through voice tone cannot be altered or hidden; as a result, tone is the number one passive indicator of what someone is thinking. When vital components of human communication, such as voice tone, are excluded from interpretation and analysis, valuable information is lost, and uninformed decisions are made. Thanks to products like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and many more, voice technology is accessible to the masses at the push of a button or a quick voice command. While these platforms are good at understanding the meaning behind our words, the experience is oftentimes frustrating. Think about the last time you had to call your bank and interact with a voice bot on the other end.

If you have an Eero mesh system, you can extend your Wi-Fi network with select Echo devices. Amazon acquired Eero in 2019, and the company has continued to turn out some of the best mesh Wi-Fi routers around. The Eero range is especially good for Alexa-based smart homes, offering tight integration if you link your Amazon and Eero accounts. Read on to find out which Echo devices can act as Eero Wi-Fi extenders and how to set them up, but note that Eero Built-in is only available in the US and Canada for now. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.