It's something we all do multiple times a week: We manually add things to our calendar while copying details over from an email. What if a bot could do that work for you? That's the idea behind Fwd2cal, a currently free project by Moe Adham that can parse any email with an appointment in it and automatically add it to your calendar. If you get an email with a potential calendar appointment in it--a party invitation, a meeting, a coworker casually mentioning you can join them for drinks after work today--you can forward it to the free bot. The service uses ChatGPT to parse the email and find the relevant bits of information, then turn that information into a calendar appointment, then add that calendar appointment to your Google Calendar.

Already, about one in four U.S. consumers has a home personal assistant at their beck and call, thanks to the success of smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Nest. But many users are just scratching the surface of what these gadgets can do. If you aren't familiar with the speakers (both starting at $35), you wake up your artificial intelligence-driven helper with a keyword – "Alexa" for Amazon devices and "OK, Google" for a Google Nest or Google Home speaker – followed by a question or command. A human-like voice will give you a response, whether you want to hear the weather, a specific song, set a timer for the oven, or control your smart devices in your home, such as adjusting lighting or a thermostat. One-fourth of U.S. consumers (25%) will use a smart speaker in 2020, up from 17% in 2018, according to research firm eMarketer.

Google Assistant is everywhere, ranging from the Android smartphone in your pocket to the smart speakers and smart displays ensconced in your kitchen or living room. And that means you can control all your smart home devices without so much as turning your head. All you need to say is "Hey Google!" What do you say after that? Well, almost anything, but here are 15 essential commands you should commit to memory.

Earlier this month, Thalmic Labs announced it would be ending the production of Myo, a gesture-controlled armband that it's been developing for the past few years. The company has decided to shift focus to an entirely different project. Today, it's finally ready to reveal what that project is. It's called Focals, a pair of smart glasses that uses holographic display technology. "Focals are a pair of everyday smart glasses that are designed from the eyewear-first perspective," Stephen Lake, North's CEO and co-founder, told Engadget.

As digital assistants improve, we're learning new things to expect from them, but the tasks that a real-life assistant may have handled before can still be a bit of a challenge to home assistants. Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is gaining functionality to help it get smarter about working with your calendar. The new abilities will let users move appointments around and schedule meetings based on other people's availability. If you've been shared on someone's calendar availability, Alexa will be able to suggest times that work for both of you. Just say, "Alexa schedule a meeting with [name]" and Amazon's assistant will search through your schedule for a good time, suggesting up to two time slots that could work.

As AI-powered automated personal assistants have increasingly found their way into our lives, their tremendous power at certain tasks has often been undermined by their inability to fuse the data available to them into a comprehensive view of our lives and, perhaps most importantly, their inability to actively anticipate our needs rather than merely passively respond to queries posted to them. How might adding proactive anticipatory reasoning and the ability to look across data allow our future AI assistants to be far more useful in our day-to-day lives? As I was taking a cab to the airport this past Friday, I noticed everywhere around me preparations for the Marine Corp Marathon, which I had completely forgotten was this weekend and which meant that when I returned early Sunday morning I was going to have difficulty getting home given all of the road closures in my neighborhood. Yet, despite having access to my calendar, which clearly noted my return flight arrival on Sunday, and being able to tell me that there was a giant marathon running directly through my neighborhood on Sunday with road closures all around my home, my AI assistant was unable to connect the two and anticipate that I might have trouble getting home via my usual route on Sunday. Heading to a meeting a week ago, my assistant could tell me there was a huge traffic delay along the way when I explicitly asked for a traffic update, but was unable on its own to connect that to my next calendar appointment and proactively suggest 30 minutes earlier that I leave half an hour early to avoid being late.

Everyone's talking about the two smartphones, so we put them head to head. Find out how Google's new Pixel compared to the iPhone X. USA TODAY Android phones come in all shapes in sizes. The Galaxy Note 8 from Samsung includes an S Pen (stylus). You're finally ready to take the plunge. Whether you're fed up with Apple's limiting iOS platform, poor battery life, or perhaps you just want a lot more selection in devices – including Google's just-revealed Pixel 2 (from $649) or Pixel 2 XL (from $849) – you're ready to jump ship.

Last year's Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge were excellent phones, and so was the Galaxy Note 7... until it started bursting into flames. While some within Samsung were tasked with figuring out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again, others were trying to build a phone that would make people move on. The Note 7 won't disappear so easily from our collective memory, but I have to hand it to Samsung: The S8 siblings are impeccably built, thoughtfully designed devices. It's not hard to look at these smartphones as the first steps on a road to redemption, and after a week of testing, I can confidently say these are two of the best smartphones money can buy. I just wish its virtual assistant wasn't so half-baked. Text and photos don't do the S8 ($750) and S8 Plus ($850) justice. From their rounded edges to their precisely formed metal-and-glass bodies, they feel like smaller, sleeker versions of the Galaxy Note 7. That's a hell of a compliment, battery insanity notwithstanding -- the Note 7 was a beautiful device and I'm glad that DNA lives on. The S8 and S8 Plus's rounded Infinity displays -- which are 5.8 and 6.2 inches big, respectively -- only add to the phones' appeal. We'll dig into these curved screens more later, but people seemed to like them enough that it didn't make sense to have non-curved flagships anymore.