Products featured in this Mail Best article are selected by our shopping writers. If you make a purchase using links on this page, Dailymail.co.uk will earn an affiliate commission. Amazon has launched a new affordable smart speaker for under £50, and it's set to rival the Echo Dot. Available to pre-order now, with shipping starting from 31 May, the brand new Echo Pop is Amazon's latest Bluetooth smart speaker with Alexa. Smaller and more affordable than the bestselling £54.99 Echo Dot, the speaker is perfect for smaller spaces yet boasts all the classic features you love.

So you just got a smart speaker as a holiday present. Now what to do with them? You've come to the right place. On command, by saying "Hey Siri," for the HomePod, "Hey Google" for the Nest Audio or "Alexa," on Echo speakers, you can instruct them to play music of your choice, either via a subscription service, or more generically, as part of a themed radio station via the Pandora service. Amazon's speakers play music from Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora and iHeartRadio, while Apple plays just from Apple Music and Pandora.

Some of the fastest-growing tech companies right now are reinventing web functions that have been with us since before the turn of the century. Not as famous as the first two, San Francisco-based Intercom has found favor as an online messaging platform that helps businesses engage and support their customers and prospects. The boom in online messaging among consumers and the rise of conversational computing in business has helped Intercom thrive since its foundation in 2011. It now has more than 30,000 paying customers globally and is backed by $241 million in venture funding. People increasingly expect to find a chat option for customer support when they visit a website or use an app, says Intercom's SVP of Marketing, Shane Murphy-Reuter: Given that every single company in the world has customer support -- typically by email, maybe calls for larger companies -- I do not see a world in the future where a messenger isn't on every single website and in every app.

McDonald's Corp. is making a bet it can automate the task of taking drive-thru orders. The world's biggest restaurant company is buying startup Apprente Inc., a developer of voice-recognition technology for use in the restaurant industry, to help speed up lines. The idea is to eventually have a machine, instead of a person, on the other side of the intercom to relay orders to kitchen staff. In Chicago-area restaurants where the system is already being tested, employees still oversee drive-thru order-taking and can step in when needed. The acquisition is McDonald's third tech deal in the past six months, and fits into the company's push to lean more heavily on machines and artificial intelligence to boost sales.

Young people have stopped picking up the phone to complain. Instead, they're increasingly likely to do business over webchat, messenger or Twitter. As artificial intelligence advances, it's likely we'll all be chatting with even more automated and intelligent bots - even if they appear on the surface like a human customer service agent. In February, the chief executive of Citigroup, Mike Corbat, suggested that "tens of thousands" of people who are currently working in their American bank centres are likely to be replaced by machines. A few days later, a report from two economists at University College Cork suggested that two in five Irish jobs might be supplanted by AI, with administration and customer service roles at particular risk, although another economist later suggested that their report was "overstated" and "fear-inducing."

Cruce Saunders This is "Towards a Smarter World," and I'm your host Cruce Saunders. Very pleased to be joined today by Elizabeth McGuane, who is the content strategy lead at Intercom where she is part of the product design team, and owns the language of the core product including its messenger app. Elizabeth's been working in UX for 10 years and before that was a journalist. I'm really glad she could be with us today. She recently wrote an amazing article to check out on TechCrunch, called "On Bots, Language, and Making Technology Disappear." Elizabeth, with that article, would you summarize some of your thinking behind how you ended up arriving the conclusion that actually naming a bot is not necessarily the best strategy? We did it through research, but I think where we started was through a really careful and considered approach to testing the language. When I started, this was one of the first projects I worked on at Intercom when I joined just over a year ago, and we were looking at introducing bot-like, very simple bot, into our messenger. We make a B2B messenger, so not to get to complicated in terms of the UX of our product, but we always have to think of our users in terms of two layers: we have our customers and then our customers' customers, and we were really creating a bot that businesses would use to communicate concepts or to get data from their customers. I knew that we need to be really careful about how we express things so that we would marry with the business' tone of voice so that we wouldn't be overstepping the bounds of what we could say on their behalf. I had a feeling, and this was really just my gut instinct, that having a very chatty personality would not necessarily marry with the tone of voice of every single business that wanted to use our messenger. It was a very practical consideration on that front. When we went into testing, we tested with a name and without out a name. We also did testing with different tones of voice because going into this I think the design leads were interested to see whether a more friendly tone of voice or a more functional tone of voice would work. That was the initial consideration of "let's just try different kinds of copy, and see what works." I felt that I wanted to take a more structured approach and try names, no names, functional, more friendly, then we also tried with a pronoun, without a pronoun. Once we realized that names didn't work we also tried removing the first person "I", and removing an introduction so that the bot didn't say, "Hi, I'm so-and-so's digital assistant," or what have you to see what impact that had. That's really where it started was with an actual structured approach to research.

In the fall of 2016 – before startups started adding artificial intelligence to every pitch, and before Bitcoin triggered a speculative frenzy and inspired a host of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs – chatbots were supposed to be the next big thing. Facebook had just announced Messenger, its chat platform that was supposed to transform how we worked and shopped. Need to make a dinner reservation? There'd be a chatbot for that, too. Google's M challenger came and quietly went.

Remember chatbots, the Next Big Thing of 2016? According to Sam Lessin, "the 2016 bot paradigm shift is going to be far more disruptive and interesting than the last decade's move from Web to mobile apps." And Chris Messina predicted, "you and I will be talking to brands and companies over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and elsewhere before year's end, and will find it normal." This was exciting -- enough so that I joined Facebook as design manager for the Messenger bot platform. It was a tough decision: I wasn't ready to move on from my previous role at Google.

The chatbot hype was mainly due to the argument that instant messaging channels have become the de facto user browser at Mobile over the last few years. With the high volume of active users, messaging platforms started integrating product and services from 3rd party partners. With the success of Wechat in China, it was easy to imagine a bright future of Chatbot. Quick forward to today, one year later after Facebook launched the Messenger platform for business, chatbots still haven't replaced apps. The main problem is the approach that Facebook and many other companies took: they were over optimistic about the state of AI technologies (mainly NLP), which are still too incipient for most business use cases.

The Echo Show is not just Amazon's best smart speaker, it's the most capable mainstream smart home assistant on the market. An Intel Atom x5-Z8350 processor and a 7-inch color touchscreen pumps its price tag up to $230, but the display is worth the added cost to have at least one in a smart home with other Echo speakers. And the Show's eight-element far-field mic array is stronger than the ones on Amazon's other Echos, which for me eliminated the need to have an Echo Dot in an adjoining room. Amazon takes full advantage of that display, providing not just useful visual feedback, but also an in-home intercom--with video, if two Echo Shows are used--and a VoIP-type videophone system. I'll elaborate on the intercom feature shortly.