In a corner of half of the UK’s internet households sits a smart speaker. Whether alongside photos of the family and a coaster for a drink beside the sofa, or amongst toasters, blenders, and utensils in the kitchen, the phrases “Alexa,” “Hey Google,” or “Hey Siri,” are being used to instigate household functions.

When you consider smart speaker popularity in the US mirrors that of the UK, too, it’s no wonder the global smart speaker market size was valued at $6.42 billion in 2020, with projections to reach $61.87 billion by 2028. This growth may well be music to the ears of tech giants the world over, but the market has shown signs of slowing down lately. According to Voicebot.ai, the smart speaker market plateaued from 42% and 32% year-on-year growth between 2018 and 2020 respectively, to 3.4% and 4.6% since the turn of the decade.

Similarly in the UK, growth from 2019 to 2020 reached 136.5% but shrunk to less than a fifth of that figure (24.5%) from 2020 to 2021. Given this slump, applied futurist Tom Cheesewirght tells IT Pro that the virtual assistant market has reached a ceiling in the current market.

"There's two core things that happened with voice that took a lot of the heat out of the market,” says Cheesewright. “Firstly, these assistants didn’t turn out to be a good application platform. There is a limited range of applications in which voice makes sense and, while there are interesting things you can do, it's not the sort of generalised application platform that the smartphone or the PC are. There was a lot of the excitement about virtual assistants that was driven by the possibility of a generalised application platform, but that leads to the second point, which is people realised that voice isn't appropriate. In a lot of contexts people don't want to be using voice as an interface, because fundamentally, it is going to disrupt your mental flow.”

Despite these issues, he stresses the widespread adoption of these devices and their intrinsic value is good. While they’re limited, there are still things people like doing with them. Nevertheless, the slumping market may force manufacturers and customers into a rethink over how virtual assistants are used. With artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse gaining traction, the technology might need to adapt to a very different tech landscape to that it encountered when it first burst onto the scene.

Finding new uses for virtual assistants

As Cheesewright points out, the use of virtual assistants for consumers have been limited to basic timers, playing music, and turning on and off the lights.

There are more uses for virtual assistants, though, and having a device in an area that can provide information with a simple question justifies the investment that’s been made in the sector over the past five years, Joshua Kaiser, Tovie AI managing director points out.

“The healthcare industry embraced virtual assistants during the COVID-19 outbreak,” he says. “In 2019, Voicebot found 7.5% of U.S. adults had used a virtual assistant for a healthcare need; in 2021, that figure surged to 21%, and there was also a boost in AI-powered conversational apps that help to screen, triage, and diagnose people who are potentially infected with COVID-19.

“Healthcare wasn’t the only service to transition to online during the pandemic, and, as a result, more companies are integrating virtual assistants to offer a smooth online experience for customers. This development has fostered a growing trend in the conversational AI industry, specifically custom virtual assistants embedded within products, web apps, and mobile apps.”

The future might be meta

As Kaiser says, despite the fairly pedestrian use cases currently in the market, interaction with voice agents is a technology that comes into its own in the future.

Yes, it's about time we mentioned that the metaverse has the capacity to change our lives in many ways – but some of the fundamental differences between the metaverse and the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies we have now are the interaction methods.

Output devices, such as keyboards and mice, will be redundant in the virtual worlds, which pave the way for people to talk to agents as they travel through the environments they find themselves in.

“This year is going to be the year of the metaverse as giants like Meta, Baidu, Huyndai and LEGO are entering the field, and virtual assistants are likely to appear heavily,” says Kaiser. “This is not just a thing from the entertainment industry, we should expect virtual offices for employees or customers in VR, populated by virtual characters.

“Going forward, I think that all major developments in virtual assistants will be related to the metaverse and virtual character trends. Emotion management in AI is one of this year’s major trends because it allows us to make synthetic speech sound human, allowing virtual assistants to sound more natural.”

Cheesewirght agrees, adding that virtual assistants will be a vital vehicle in which the metaverse will be delivered. “Voice allows the user interface to make AR useful and not a flood of popups or even trying to replicate the smartphone experience on a pair of glasses.

“A shift is coming where most people will spend ten hours a day in mixed reality. In this context, voice starts to be a lot more useful, both in a consumer context and in a business context, because when your primary interface isn't a keyboard and mouse, and your personal AI gets to know you, it can be a great help and even make decisions for you.

“Voice is a natural interface, and when you have always got a pair of headphones in, or a pair of glasses, you can have that subtle, private, conversation with your virtual assistant. I think that's the moment where voice becomes much more important. There are issues to overcome with virtual assistants now, for example, even with ten years of evolution of array mics, interpretation, and algorithms, there's still huge comprehension issues. But when the microphone is physically connected to your head, the clarity, comprehension, and usability should be an awful lot better.”

Almost a third (31%) of Brits don’t know how to recycle unwanted electrical items, with 41% admitting to having cupboards full of cables, broadband hubs, and even printers.

That's according to new research from BT, which surveyed 3,600 UK adults on their tech recycling habits.

The research found that printers were the most confusing item to recycle, with 31% not knowing how to do so. This was followed by cables (30%), which was also the most commonly unused item stored at home, with almost half (44%) of UK adults admitting to having them clutter up their cupboards and drawers. Other items commonly hoarded include broadband hubs (29%), smart speakers (26%), and Wi-Fi extenders (21%).

BT found that the majority of UK adults (74%) place electronics in black bin liners, committing them to landfill instead of recycling, which has disastrous consequences on the environment. Another 55% of Britons admitted to engaging in ‘wishful recycling’ – placing e-waste in recycling bins in hopes that they’ll reach a recycling centre.

This is why BT is appealing to the public to seek recycling guidance by contacting their local authority or find more information on Recycle Now. The company has also implemented some recycling changes of its own, by making it obligatory for customers to return no longer needed broadband routers.

Matthew Hughes, director of Broadband at BT, said that this rule, introduced in 2019, “really boosted [BT’s] recycling efforts”.

“Thanks to these changes and the commitment of our customers, we’ve prevented the release of 11,430 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of 6,000 flights from London to Tokyo,” he added, citing figures provided by the Carbon Trust.

The company has also committed to becoming a net-zero carbon emissions business by 2045, and in February 2021 signed a three-year renewable energy supply deal with TotalEnergies.

The news comes as the UK’s technology sector is being urged to make a formal commitment to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, with the UK’s Net Zero Business Champion asking companies to sign a pledge available on the Business Climate Hub’s website.

Amazon is aiming to re-energise its Alexa voice platform with the release of a trove of new developer tools, announced at its Alexa Live conference on Wednesday.

The company hopes the new tools will help create more variety on the platform and encourage Alexa device owners to discover and engage with more Alexa apps and services, referred to as 'skills'.

However, the update has come after a significant drop in new skills being developed over the last three years. As of October 2020, total Alexa skills in the UK were 37,000, and 77,000 in the US, according to research from Voicebot.ai.

The findings suggest that in 2019, the rate of new Alexa skills introduced per day in the US was 58% lower than in 2018, with a further decline of 38% in 2020. The rate of new skills per day in the UK was 66% lower in the first three quarters of 2020 compared to the full year 2019.

Part of the problem is that finding new skills is hampered by its voice-only interface – with users being unable to easily see what's available at a glance. Amazon has attempted to fix this by launching Alexa-enabled devices with smart screens, but with the launch of new tools that help developers better surface their skills to users, the firm clearly feels more could be done.

This includes a new feature that will see Alexa respond to common requests, such as "Alexa, tell me a story" or "Alexa, let's play a game", with personalised skill suggestions based on customer use. And a new "contextual discovery" mechanism will allow customers to use natural language and phrases to accomplish tasks across skills.

For users with screen-based devices, the new tools include widgets and Featured Skill Cards for developers to promote their news apps – essentially as a way to make Alexa skills discoverable like apps on a mobile phone.

Amazon is also improving the ways in which developers can monetise their applications with support for 'Paid Skills', and in-skill purchases.

Microsoft has finally called time on its Cortana mobile app, with users in the US no longer able to access reminders and lists created in it as of today.

The company originally revealed plans to retire the app in November 2019 and it ceased to operate in the UK and other non-US territories on 31 January 2020.

US users were initially given a reprieve, but in July last year Microsoft announced it would retire all third-party support of the AI tool after 31 March 2021.

This isn’t the end of Cortana, at least not for now. According to Microsoft, the virtual assistant, which was launched in 2014, will continue “its evolution as a productivity assistant”.

The move was fueled by the product proving to be less successful among consumers compared to rivals such as Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa. At the same time, Microsoft also acknowledged the popularity of competitors’ tools by allowing them to become more accessible on Windows 10. Since September 2019, users have been able to open their laptops as well as Amazon Echo devices by calling out 'Alexa', while Cortana had been moved into a separate app in the Microsoft store and away from the built-in search experience in the operating system.

Sunsetting the Cortana mobile app is in line with Microsoft’s ambitions to transform Cortana into an enterprise-focused tool. In 2019, CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft envisions Cortana as an assistant to Office 365, which is also primarily a desktop-focused product, rather than a mobile one.

Last year, Microsoft announced the decision to improve Cortana’s integration with Office 365 by allowing users to manage their calendars and email using voice commands. The tech giant also combined Cortana functionalities with Microsoft Teams, making it possible to join meetings, make a call, share files with colleagues, and even send chat messages using the virtual assistant.

With infrastructures forced to adapt quickly to coronavirus-forced remote work, customer voice capture has become more difficult. Red Box just announced its new Conversa voice platform, which will help streamline this vital audio and media data collection.

Conversa is an open microservices-based, cloud-agnostic enterprise voice platform that allows a business to listen to, share and act upon conversations with customers. Conversa created high-quality recordings and transcripts of all customer conversations and works on all platforms, including on-premise, cloud and even hybrid.

Free and open REST APIs give companies real-time access to the recordings and transcripts, but it also provides the security needed to keep this sensitive data safe. What’s more, Conversa provides AI-ready voice, media, metadata, and transcripts supported by nearly any application. This flexibility allows companies to enter the data into almost any AI, analytics, CRM, BI and compliance tool to help transform their businesses.

According to Richard Stevenson, CEO of Red Box, “With organisations under increased pressure to support distributed workforces, as well as driving differentiation through digital transformation, it’s even more critical than ever for them to retain sovereignty of one of their richest and most powerful data sets: the voice of their customer and employees.”

Stevenson continued, “Conversa empowers organisations to tap into the rich insights within enterprise wide audio and media data whilst also benefiting from market-leading infrastructure.”

Red Box Conversa will be available in a limited release soon.

Google's Android TV platform might soon be able to recognize individual users' voices.

If you have a Google Assistant in your home, you probably already know you can train it to recognize your individual voice so you can get personalized responses. Google announced earlier this month that smart assistant features, such as Voice Match, will be coming to all smart devices soon, and it looks like Android TV will be included.

That's according to 9to5Google, which has found evidence that Google is planning to unleash Assistant and Home integration for the platform.

What does that mean for users? Voice recognition could make it easy to jump right to what you want to watch. If you say, “Play Ozark on Netflix” it can jump right to your account and pick up where you left off. Previously, it would simply open to whoever was logged in last.

Currently, Google Assistant can differentiate up to six voices in your home. Voice recognition is a feature that streamlines the use of shared devices and should be a welcome addition to TV viewing. But be careful what you say because your Google Assistant could be recording you.

It’s possible that the new voice-recognition implementation will also go into the soon-to-be-released streaming gaming system, Stadia.

The BBC has opened the testing phase for its AI-powered voice assistant exclusively with those who routinely test updates to the Windows operating system.

UK members of the Windows Insider Programme can download the virtual assistant by grabbing the ‘Beeb BETA’ app from the Microsoft Store, where they can experiment with features and put the voice assistant through its paces.

These users will need to have installed the Windows 10 May 2020 update, however, which, Microsoft has incidentally warned its users against doing unless it’s shipped to their devices specifically. This is due to the developer identifying a string of issues that could lead to significant errors due to hardware compatibility issues.

The Beeb AI assistant aims to help users in the UK by navigating BBC services and access BBC content. There are no plans to build a device to rival Amazon Echo or Google Home, although Beeb will be built into the BBC website, iPlayer and all smart TVs.

The BBC's voice team has previously collaborated with Microsoft to build the infrastructure behind Beeb with Azure AI services, as well as working with the industry giant on a number of other projects in the past.

“We’ve built Beeb because we know there is growing demand from people to access programmes and services with their voice - around one in five adults have a smart speaker in their home, and millions more have voice-activated devices in their pockets,” said BBC Design and Engineering’s chief operating officer Grace Boswood.

“Much like the BBC did with iPlayer, we want to make sure everyone can benefit from this new technology, and bring people exciting new content, programmes and services in a trusted, easy-to-use way.”

The first version of Beeb will allow users to speak to access live TV and radio broadcast as well as programmes on-demand. Developers will add further features in the coming weeks and months, with feedback from Windows Insiders critical to the development path.

Not everything will be working as it should, the BBC added, with developers hoping feedback can shape what this early, stripped-down version will look like in the future when additions are made and compatibility with systems is expanded.

This beta-testing process will precede the rollout of Beeb in beta version to the general public for further testing and experimentation.

Amazon, Apple and Google are serious competitors, but they've found something they can work together on: making voice assistants work for smart homes.

The tech giants have joined up with IoT standards organisation the Zigbee Alliance to create the Project Connected Home over IP working group to promote interoperability between connected smart-home devices by creating a new Internet Protocol (IP) standard.

"While smart home devices are abundant, the lack of an industry-wide connectivity standard leaves people confused and frustrated when trying to understand what devices work with each smart home ecosystem," writes Nik Sathe, vice president of engineering at Google Nest, and Grant Erickson, principal engineer at Google Nest, in a blog post. "It also places a heavy burden on manufacturers to make sure all devices are compatible with each other."

The aim is to increase compatibility - so your smart home system will work with voice assistants such as Amazon Echo, Google Home or Apple Siri - and to ensure security is built-in at the design stage. For developers, that means it'll be easier to develop smart home products that use such voice assistants as an interface. For consumers, it means products should simply work with whichever of the three systems they prefer.

"The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers," the Zigbee Alliance says in a statement. "The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use."

The Google engineers add: "Smart home devices will be compatible with various platforms, so you can choose between Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri or other platforms."

That doesn't mean that we'll end up with a single smart home interface or one voice assistant, the project notes — instead, it'll be easier for third-party developers to make devices that use Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, or Google Assistant. That may include a standard for "lifecycle events", such as software updates.

The working group created by the agreement will develop and implement a new unified connectivity protocol based on open-source standards, but making use of existing technologies from Amazon, Apple and Google. That will start with Amazon's Alexa Smart Home, Apple's HomeKit, Google's Weave and Thread, and the Zigbee Alliance's Dotdot data models.

"Today there is no widely adopted open standard for smart home which is built upon IP and yet IP is the protocol of the internet and is the most common network layer used in our homes and offices," reads a statement on the project's website."

With IP, messages can be routed across networks independent of the physical and link layers underlying them and there are ample battle-tested algorithms and infrastructure for performing routing, switching and firewalling in robust and resilient ways."

It isn't yet clear when the new protocol will be available, though the three tech giants said their existing products will continue to be supported in the meantime. The first specifications to be released will be Wi-Fi, Thread, and IP versions of Bluetooth Low Energy.

The Zigbee Alliance board also includes Ikea, Samsung SmartThings, and Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), among others — suggesting systems from those manufacturers will work with voice assistants from the tech giants.

Is that the Eiffel Tower I can see from my bedroom window in Sussex? My mistake, it's a 5G phone mast. Or at least it will be, if this week's Digital Secretary, Nicky Morgan, gets her way.

Morgan has launched a "consultation" government jargon for something they're going to do anyway, but want to make it look like they're listening that will eventually allow mobile operators to build masts taller than 25m. Bigger masts mean signals that stretch further, meaning us out here in the boondocks might stand a fighting chance of getting a decent mobile signal without having to lean out of the loft skylight.

That's the theory, anyway. The truth is that 5G signals stand as much chance of passing through trees, walls and other obstacles as I do of passing through a Pirelli calendar audition.

With 4G nothing but a rumour in these parts, I'm not holding my breath for 5G. In fact, I'm beginning to give up on the 'phone' altogether.

I've tried several means of boosting my pathetic signal. I've switched mobile networks, switched handsets, switched on BT Mobile's risible Wi-Fi Calling service. The latter made yoghurt pots and string sound like Dolby Cinema.

The best solution I've found is to avoid the phone full stop. They don't shout about it a great deal, but both Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers allow you to make free mobile and landline calls over the Wi-Fi network. You say "Alexa, ring Dad's mobile" and after a couple of seconds of thinking, you get put through to the old boy's phone.

Google Home is even more impressive in this regard, because it can call numbers you don't know. If you tell Google to call the Ask restaurant in Lewes, for example, it will look up the number and put you through. It's like Directory Enquiries, except you don't need to remortgage your house to pay for it first.

Call quality via both Alexa and Google Assistant is decent and reliable (Alexa slightly more so, in my experience), and you can tell both services your mobile phone number so that when you call friends and family, your name rather than "Unknown caller" pops up on their mobile screen.

The only downsides are that you're completely snookered if the company you're calling has one of those "press 1 for sales" switchboards, and you feel a bit of a plum saying "Alexa, end call" when you've finished your conversation it's normally best to let the other person hang up first.

The Amazon and Google options will deal with most outgoing call scenarios, but what about incoming calls? Here, I'm working on a Heath Robinson solution. Skype lets you buy UK numbers at a relatively modest cost of a fiver a month, so I can divert all my mobile calls to that number and pick up my incoming mobile calls on Skype, without worrying too much that the call will drop after five seconds.

The problem with this approach? Skype itself, which has an uncanny knack of ringing every device except the one you actually want to pick up the call from. This leads to hilarious scenarios where I find myself pressing an iPad to my ear. Yes it looks ridiculous, but it's still nowhere near as ridiculous as the Crystal Palace-sized mast Nicky Morgan wants to erect in my back garden.

EasyJet has introduced a new feature to its app that will allow customers to search for flights using voice recognition technology.

The search feature uses AI and Dialogflow, Google Cloud's natural language understanding tool for building conversational experiences, to support voice-based flight queries about destinations, dates and airports.

While typing a search query takes 12 taps, EasyJet said that with the vocal steps in Speak Now it could reduce this process to a few seconds.

Daniel Young, head of digital experience at EasyJet said the airline was aiming to improve the travel experience, including making booking flights more accessible, "especially for those who are visually impaired, and Speak Now helps us achieve this objective."

"We continue to place innovation at the heart of our industry-leading mobile travel app to give our customers the tools they need to have a smooth experience booking flights with us. Embracing this latest technology makes preparing for travel, easy and fun," he said.

Cormac Reilly, VP & global head of Travel Partners Solutions, who developed the technology for EasyJet at Travelport, said that this would make booking travel "as easy as possible, giving EasyJet customers a helpful digital experience".

"Conversational voice search is a great example of how we're using the latest technologies, including AI and Google Cloud's Dialogflow, to make the experience of buying and managing travel continually better for everyone," he added.

The voice search functionality will be available in English on iOS and follows other advances developed by the airline including a visual search tool using Instagram images (Look&Book), and a cabin bag-sizer tool, which includes augmented reality technology to enable passengers to check the size of their hand-luggage before heading to the airport.

The Speak Now feature will be launched on EasyJet's app in the coming weeks.

Natural language processing, a form of machine learning, is one of the hardest tasks researchers have faced in creating advanced AI systems. Yet it has the potential to greatly improve people’s lives, including how they access information or carry out everyday administrative tasks.

The premise sounds simple – natural language processing, or NLP, allows humans to make requests of a system as if they were talking to another human. In reality, however, humans and machines interact with data in very different ways. 

For example, if you saw someone you live or work with heading outside you might ask where they’re going. If they’re going to the shops, they could answer in any number of ways, from “I’m just headed to the shops” to “nipping to the supermarket” to “off to buy some bread”. As a human, abstract thinking and experience will distil all of this information down to deliver the same information. 

A computer, however, doesn’t have the benefit of either of these things, making it hard for it to understand these variations on a theme. Instead, it relies on pre-set instructions to carry out a defined operation.

Natural language processing seeks to overcome these limitations, making data sorting and retrieval easier for both parties.

One common use case for natural language processing now is telephone switchboards. If you make a call to a bank, for example, it’s not unusual to be met by an automated voice welcoming you to the bank’s customer service line and asking “what would you like to do today?” or something similar.

Thanks to natural language processing, you don’t have to say an exact phrase – “make a payment” and “pay someone” would be interpreted the same way.

This is a significant improvement on existing automated systems that relied on a menu requiring either an exact phrase or keypad input.

Although it might seem strange at first, automating customer service is a natural progression of implementing AI in our daily lives. In fact, it brings in a bevy of benefits, from reducing workload of staff members to even contributing to a safer working environment by limiting the amount of verbal abuse received from frustrated customers.

Natural language processing: It's a complex problem 

However, having an effective conversation or reading text is rife with nuances, inferences and judgements. It's one thing to break a language up into nouns, verbs, adjectives and the rest, but language is about far more than the various mechanisms that structure a sentence - and it's this added complexity that makes it difficult for computers to interpret and mimic human interaction.

The same word can have different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. Consider this example: the 'aeroplane banked to the left', or 'I banked the cheque you gave me'. How about 'I stood at the bow of the ship' compared to 'Mark tied his shoelaces into a bow' - not to mention the act of bowing to an audience or the device used to shoot an arrow.

Knowing how 'bow' is used in each of those sentences depends on the context provided by the surrounding words. Yet sometimes the context of the surrounding words doesn't help either. For example, consider "I saw the hiker on the path with binoculars". Who has the binoculars - me or the hiker?

The English language is heavily reliant on context, something that non-English speakers have difficulties with, never mind a machine. And that's before we start factoring in various highly-personal traits that characterise the person speaking, such as irony, sarcasm and humour, which even us humans can find difficult to infer from sentences alone.

Natural language processing: What is it capable of?

Natural language processing helps overcome any problems associated with understanding spoken language by combining data and algorithms to create context. There are two main aspects to how this works - syntax and semantics.

Syntax is by far the easiest of the two to apply, given that it deals with clearly defined rules. This includes dictionary definitions, the structure of sentences and, most notably, parsing, which relates to understanding what the sentence actually means. With the 'binocular' example above, parsing helps to identify who they belong to by using earlier or later sentences.

With natural language processing, algorithms are able to apply a number of different syntactic processing techniques to help break down these rules. These include: 'word segmentation', which dissects large chunks of text into distinct sections; 'stemming', which involves refining an inflected word to its root form; and morphological segmentation, which involves breaking a word down into its smallest meaningful units, such as 'in', 'come', '-ing' for 'incoming'.

Semantics, however, is far less structured and usually the more difficult to interpret. This aspect involves understanding the meaning of individual words within the broader context of the sentence. As with the examples above, this is understanding the various and most appropriate uses of the word 'bow'.

Semantic analysis can include 'named entry recognition', which involves figuring out which pieces of text map to proper names, and then determining what type of name it is, whether that's a person's name or the name of a location. Systems can rely on the convention of capitalising the first letter to easily identify a given name, however, this is also true of the first letter of a sentence and many organisation names do not capitalise every letter. What's more, capitalisation rules are not uniform across languages - in German, every noun is capitalised, for example.

This is symptomatic of semantic analysis in general – although there are techniques available, there are a number of hurdles still left to overcome.

Natural language processing and generative AI

Another place people will increasingly be encountering natural language processing is when they interact with generative AI, such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot.

While GenAI and NLP aren’t the same thing, AI chatbots use natural language processing to interpret users’ requests and generate a unique response. This takes the NLP journey a step further and enhances the experience of the person interacting with the chatbot.

With the excitement, interest and – importantly – investment in advanced AI that has been generated since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the capabilities of NLP will doubtlessly increase in the future.

The BBC is working on a voice assistant that will better understand the way people speak across the UK.

According to reports from BBC News, the assistant, currently given a working title of "Beeb", will be trained on a variety of regional accents with BBC staff being used to help in its training. Understanding voices from across the UK has long been a problem from voice assistants more attuned for US accents.

The AI assistant is being developed by an in-house team at the broadcaster and is set to be launched next year with the aim of helping users in the UK. While the BBC has no plans to launch its own device to rival the Amazon Echo or Google Home, Beeb would be built into the BBC's website, iPlayer app and smart TVs and made available to manufacturers that wanted to use the software on their devices.

The voice assistant will be activated by the wake word "Beeb", but will not replicate the functionality found in other voice assistants as a much smaller team is developing the technology. BBC employees will be asked to record a couple of minutes of audio to help train the assistant to understand different accents and dialects.

"Around one in five adults have a smart speaker in their home and millions more have voice-activated devices in their pockets so there is growing demand from people to access programmes and services with their voice. But people are concerned about how these devices use their data," said a BBC spokesperson.

"We want to make sure everyone can benefit from this new technology, and bring people exciting new content, programmes and services in a trusted, easy-to-use way. This marks another step in ensuring public service values can be protected in a voice-enabled future," they added.

NatWest has become the first high street bank in the UK to trial voice banking using artificial intelligence technology.

The banking giant will soon allow customers to log in to their bank account by speaking to a Google Home speaker, according to the Guardian.

Through a trial of the service, customers will be able to ask the smart speaker to read out basic information from their banking account. For example, they could ask for their balance, latest and pending transactions.

But if the trial goes well, customers could have access to even more advanced features in the future. NatWest confirmed that users may one day be able to transfer funds and pay bills using the system.

NatWest customers will be able to access their accounts via the service by saying aloud two digits of a four-digit password. To use the service, they must set up voice banking through an existing online banking account.

The bank intends to trial voice banking with 500 customers over the next three months, before evaluating the results and launching a wider rollout.

Speaking to the Guardian, NatWest claimed that the technology could be the biggest revolution in the financial services industry since the rise of mobile banking.

Kristen Bennie, head of 'Open Experience' at NatWest, said: "We are exploring voice banking for the first time and think it could mark the beginning of a major change to how customers manage their finances in the same way mobile banking made a huge impact."

The scheme follows a trial between NatWest and RBS in March that saw the roll out of biometric bank cards to 200 customers, allowing them to verify transactions using a fingerprint.

While many people will no doubt be fine with online banking, voice banking could prove popular for people with disabilities and those that find it difficult to read from screens.

However, the announcement of the technology has raised legitimate concerns around security. Just last month, it emerged that Google contractors could listen to recordings from Google Assistant.

Technology analyst Paolo Pescatore told IT Pro: "Every vertical is looking at how technology and voice can revolutionise their businesses and add value for users.

"For sure, voice is a killer feature for users as it removes the complexity of accessing everyday tasks. However, this use case highlights potential security vulnerabilities. Some individuals will abuse the system by recording people's voices to access accounts or hack into recordings."

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has entered into an open collaboration with Amazon to feed sensitive data into the software powering its Alexa virtual assistant.

With access to information held on the NHS website, the government hopes the artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm used by Alexa could generate more accurate guidance for individuals who make voice requests.

The widespread use of this technology, in turn, could potentially reduce the pressure on NHS clinicians and GPs by giving patients access to remedies for common illnesses. Example queries, the government has said, include: "Alexa, how do I treat a migraine?" and "Alexa, what are the symptoms of chickenpox?"

While the government has heralded the move as an example of pure clinical innovation, privacy campaigners have highlighted the data protection risks associated with integrating sensitive health queries with a commercial entity.

The shadow culture secretary and digital rights campaigner Tom Watson MP, for example, branded the move "the beginning of Mission Creep".

"The giant data monopolies want one thing: more and more data to drive their huge profits," Watson said. "Entrusting Amazon's Alexa to dispense health advice to patients simply opens the door to the holy grail - our NHS data."

Concerns around the move primarily centre on how patients' records are to be stored, for what purposes, and whether these will be exploited commercially. However, the health secretary Matt Hancock MP insisted the data is not commercialised, and that it will be encrypted.

"There are millions of people who have Alexa in their home, and they turn to Alexa and ask Alexa for medical advice," Hancock said in an interview with the BBC's Today Programme.

"I want the very best advice on Alexa and I want the very best advice on other tech platforms too. Providing the NHS advice which, of course, is provided for free, is because we want to make sure when people ask for medical advice they get the best advice.

"The privacy element of this is very important and there's a clear protocol in place that Amazon has, and indeed that we have within the NHS for the storage of data.

"But the data point, really, that has to be dealt with, but it can't take away from using modern technology so that if people want to they can get the very best advice, as well, of course, as always being able to see your GP face to face if you'd like."

Also speaking with the BBC, privacy group Big Brother Watch branded the move "a data protection disaster waiting to happen".

"Any public money spent on this awful plan rather than frontline services would be a breathtaking waste," its director Silkie Carlo said. "Healthcare is made inaccessible when trust and privacy is stripped away, and that's what this terrible plan would do."

Amazon has argued against these suggestions, indicating the information is not shared with third-parties or fed into what could amount to individual health profiles for customers. Moreover, the company says it enforces multi-factor authentication to restrict access, as well as encrypting the data.

The move forms part of the NHS' long-term plan for digital transformation across the entire health service. A report published earlier this year highlighted the need to implement more technologies within the NHS, as well as boost digital skills across the organisation.

"Customer trust is of the utmost importance, and Amazon take privacy seriously," a company spokesperson said.

"Customers are in control of their voice history. They can review and delete voice recordings in the Alexa App or by visiting amazon.co.uk/privacy. They can also opt-in to "delete what I just said" or "delete what I said today".

The NHS remains in discussions with other tech companies over the use of feed health data into the software powering rival voice assistants, like Microsoft's Cortana.

Alexa may have wormed her way into our homes in a way few people would have predicted five years ago, but will she soon become a work colleague too?

Quietly, almost under the radar, Amazon is rolling out Alexa for Business - an enterprise-grade management system for Alexa devices. Amazon doesn't only see Alexa sitting in the corner of your living room or on your bedside table; Amazon wants her managing your meeting rooms, switching the slides during a presentation, or even being used to switch the television channel from your hospital bed.

Amazon Alexa is already big business. Now Amazon wants it to become big in business. Will she slip into offices, factories and fleet vehicles as effortlessly as she's become omnipresent in our homes? It's already happening, but there are also signs that employees are starting to resent their new workmate.

Building the business case

Are those Echo devices we've grown so attached to in the home mere stalking horses for a bigger - and potentially more lucrative - incursion into our office space? If you watch the promo videos for Alexa for Business, you certainly get that impression.

Amazon's demo video shows how employees move seamlessly from chatting to their Echo Show on the kitchen unit to barking commands to the one on their desk. It starts with basic diktats, such as checking appointments and booking meetings, and gradually ramps to more sophisticated tasks. An Echo speaker in a meeting room helps sort out a double-booking issue; a presenter asks Alexa to "bring up the last quarter sales report" and it instantly appears on the meeting room screen; an Echo Dot mounted over the photocopier allows an employee to report the device is out of paper.

In much the same way an IT department might use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to provision Windows 10 PCs across the company, companies can use Alexa for Business to deploy and manage the Alexa-enabled kit. Employees can link their personal Alexa accounts to their Alexa for Business account, letting them check their work calendar on their home devices, for instance, or join a conference call if they're working from home. Alexa for Business also supports shared devices that can be placed in areas such as meeting rooms and reception desks. These devices aren't associated with any one user account and refuse to install personal skills, so there's no breach of privacy.

Indeed, an Amazon spokesperson was keen to stress key differences in the privacy settings of consumer and business-grade Alexa. "AWS [Amazon Web Services] is vigilant about our customers' privacy and unlike with a personal Alexa-enabled device, where a user can review their voice recordings in the Alexa companion app, Alexa for Business organisations cannot access any voice recordings or text transcripts of what a user said," the spokesperson tells us. "In addition, the organisation doesn't see Alexa's responses to users' queries."

Alexa for Business can be used for shared devices in areas such as meeting rooms - handy for presentations

Amazon is building a whole business ecosystem around Alexa, including support for third-party devices and integrations. Want to check you've got an item in stock or approve an expenses claim? You can do so using the skill for ERP system Acumatica, for example.

"Alexa is an incredibly important strategic platform for Amazon," explains Nick McQuire, vice president of enterprise research at CCS Insight. "In the last 12-18 months, AWS has pushed into AI services and solutions for businesses. They're a big believer that voice is the next interface for consumers and enterprises."

Desk jobs

While talking to Alexa at your desk may make some feel a tad self-conscious, others are more interested in its ability to connect remote teams. Simon Hudson is director of innovation at digital solutions firm Cloud2 and confesses to "having a bit of a love affair with the Alexa devices, probably because it's like being on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise".

Although Alexa for Business has not yet launched in the UK, Cloud2 has begun putting Alexa devices on employees' desks to improve communications between the half of the company's staff that are based at the firm's headquarters in Bradford and the other half who are "spread thinly over Yorkshire". Currently, staff tend to use Skype or Microsoft Teams for voice communication, "but even that feels a little bit artificial," says Hudson. "We've got to grab a machine, put a headset on. It's not everything it could be. I want to walk around the office having conversations with my colleagues without being tied down to a PC."

Hudson has also "been looking at the technologies already built into the Echo for doing announcements... telling people stuff they need to know. Instead of sending out an email saying we've just won this project, you'll say 'Alexa, broadcast...'" and have that message relayed via the Echo speaker on employees' desks.

CCS Insight's McQuire says the majority of voice assistant rollouts in business are dealing with quite basic tasks. The research firm surveyed 700 employees across the US and Europe and found that 30% of employees used voice assistants for work-related tasks. "It's very rudimentary tasks that are highly repetitive - things like checking a calendar, scheduling meetings," he says.

Beyond knowledge workers

While early adoption of voice assistants tends to centre around traditional office jobs, it's Alexa's scope to reach the people in businesses who are often overlooked that excites Simon Hudson.

"There are a lot of frontline workers who have no identity at all on the IT systems, or if they do have an identity, they simply don't touch a device very often," says Hudson. "Some of the conversations I've had with clients over the past couple of years is how do they provide access to company comms and company information to those people. What if we could put Alexa-type devices in breakout rooms, canteens, that kind of place that will allow people to directly query those type of devices to get appropriate information?"

As voice systems develop and begin to deliver more sophisticated features, such as the ability to determine who's speaking and the ability to transcribe users' responses, so too will their usefulness within businesses. "There's a real need for organisations to be able to push out HR info," explains Hudson. "How do I book my leave? What do I do if someone is bullying me? [Those type of questions] can initially be answered with general advice, the kind of things you'd find in the staff handbook. But both Microsoft and Amazon are very close to going into production with their voice identification service.

"It [the voice system] will be able to say 'I know it's Simon' and can infer there's no one else in the room because there's no other chatter. It will be able to ask 'do you want a confidential conversation about this?' And if the person says 'yes', will be able to talk about things that are a bit more private."

However, with less than a fifth of British homes owning a dedicated voice assistant, companies will need to tread carefully when installing this tech in the workplace, McQuire believes. "There's quite a bit of change management and education needed in companies when rolling out these technologies," he says. "Really early adopters will use it, will know what questions to ask and know the limitations because they use it at home. For a certain constituency of employees, it's a challenge. You can't just stick Alexa into a meeting room and say, 'fill your boots'."

Employers must also overcome the suspicion that the device has been installed partly - or purely - to keep an eye on them while the boss's back is turned. "'Is it always listening?' is one of the fears employees have about such devices," says McQuire. "One piece of feedback from early adopters is that employees unplug them quite often."

An Amazon spokesperson claimed employers can allay staff fears over workplace snooping. "An organisation can mitigate personal employee concern by reiterating that they have no access to the information it receives about how they use a personal device, outside of when they interact with corporate skills."

Bedside manner

Perhaps the most intriguing enterprise applications for Alexa don't concern an office environment at all. The Cedar-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles, for example, has created 100 "smart hospital rooms", each one fitted with an Amazon Echo Dot-like device.

Patients at LA's Ceder-Sinai hospital can use Alexa to request more painkillers - or simply to change the TV channel

Alexa caters for a range of patient needs. Patients can ask Alexa for more painkillers and the message is automatically relayed to an on-duty clinician. If they simply need the toilet, the message is routed to a caregiver, and if the message isn't responded to promptly it's sent further up the chain of command.

Alexa can also help keep the patient entertained. Patients can use voice commands to change the channel on their television, to listen to music, or to stay in touch with the outside world by delivering news bulletins on demand. Even these rudimentary tasks can ease the burden on the hospital's staff. "Whereas previously nurses were frequently asked to help with the in-room television, Alexa does that job for us, allowing nurses to focus on providing the highest level of patient care," says Golda Morales, assistant nurse manager of general surgery at the hospital.

What's more, because Alexa is - of course - entirely hands-free, there's no risk of infections being spread as there is with handling touchscreen televisions or remote controls. The companionship of the friendly voice assistant can have a positive effect on patients' mental wellbeing, too. "Patients young and old are now used to voice-activated devices in their homes," says the hospital's executive director of medical and surgical services, Peachy Hain. "Since it's familiar to them, it helps enhance their hospital experience. In the hospital, patients have little to distract them from pain or loneliness."

Many car manufacturers are now adding Alexa support, which will allow drivers to log tasks hands-free

Simon Hudson says his company is working on ways to make Alexa even more useful in the medical industry. "We do a lot of work with the NHS," he explains. "One of the visions we have is to ensure clinicians have access to augmented intelligence. There can be a device that gives them prompts or advice as they're treating patients. We have visions of a device that listens to the conversations that go on and uses input from those conversations to make discreet recommendations via a screen to the clinician. Prompting people for things they may not have remembered is an interesting model."

Vehicle fleet management is another area where Alexa has the potential to be a valuable workmate. Almost every new vehicle that was on show at CES 2019 offered Alexa support, potentially making it easier for drivers to perform logging tasks without having to take their hands off the wheel or use a separate device. They can, for instance, report their arrival at a destination, confirm mileage or report that a package has been delivered via their employers' skills.

Fleet managers can also use Alexa back in the office to keep tabs on drivers. Logistics specialist Express Dedicated LLC has an Alexa skill that allows the fleet manager to ask for the current location of a particular vehicle and have the voice assistant read back its whereabouts. Other potential applications include querying whether a driver has returned to the yard, the repair status of a vehicle or even its current fuel level.

CCS Insight's McQuire says that Alexa becoming commonplace in in-car systems could well "be an inroad into the wider fleet management environment" for Amazon. "The more Alexa is adopted across consumer scenarios, the better place it will be in the enterprise."

I always find it intriguing to follow the rises and falls, the ebb and flow, of the IT marketplace. What's in and what's out? Who are the rising stars, and who are the has-beens?

It's not always about shiny new ideas. We still rely heavily on old-fashioned tools such as word processors and spreadsheets. Look at Microsoft Office and you'll see little that's significantly changed from 20 years ago. Yes, the products today are much more capable than those of the past. But it's hard to pin down any big changes that make a real difference to individual users.

Windows as an operating system hasn't really changed that much either. The shift to 64-bit, the new memory management model, new graphics engines and a host of other details are all important in their own ways. But does my aunt use Windows in a better and different way than she did 20 years ago? I doubt it.

Yet some things have changed enormously in the past decade. Perhaps the leading one has been the rise of the smartphone and tablet, led by Apple with its iPhone and iPad, and followed by the sea of Android devices. I can't imagine going back to my trusty old Nokia.

With that perspective, the industry-wide take-over of Amazon Alexa is breathtaking to behold. At CES this year it kept reappearing at stand after stand; I can't remember anything shaking things up so quickly and completely since, well, the launch of the iPhone, over a decade ago.

Today, if your product isn't Alexa-enabled, or at least Alexa-supporting, then you are toast. It really is as simple as that. Of course, something better will come along in the future, perhaps derived from Alexa itself or maybe a new entrant. Google is trying to hang on with its Home and Assistant products, and Apple has its Siri solution too, but it's Alexa that has stampeded across the planet.

Then, while thinking about all this, it struck me - where is Cortana? An irrelevant sideshow, more of an irritation than a help. Microsoft has missed the boat when it comes to expanding its consumer offering beyond the Windows platform itself.

And it's far from the first time. The company was desperately late to music players with the unpleasantly brown Zune. Mobile phones? Given up and walked away from, while a quarter of a trillion dollars has flowed into Apple's coffers. Tablets? Well, you might like Windows 10 in a touch environment, but I still find it messy and awkward on my Surface Book, and far too many apps are simply not touch-oriented.

Microsoft has also abandoned its investment in in-car systems, before ever really getting anywhere. Ford has dropped the Microsoft Sync platform in favour of a QNX-based solution, and almost every other in-car platform is in some way owned by Harmon, which is in turn now owned by Samsung.

App stores? Nope again. Microsoft has nothing here to rival iOS, Android Play Store or even Kindle. How about an online video streaming service, one totally suited to cloud? Something to compete with Netflix or Amazon Prime or YouTube? Nothing. And it never succeeded in music either, shutting down its own music service. Search engines? Well, who uses Bing?

The contrast between this and the unstoppable success of Amazon's all-conquering Alexa couldn't be starker. Yet somehow, Microsoft remains one of the three biggest companies in the world, with a market value of almost a trillion dollars. After so many strategic missteps in so many areas, any sane person would be left wondering what was going on.

The answer lies in the company's quarterly financial results. While its big ideas may have flopped with the general public, Microsoft is successfully extracting a great deal of money from the corporate world - and this is rising quarter by quarter. It's also investing heavily into future-reaching areas such as AI, healthcare and quantum computing. Clearly, Microsoft has decided that working on things that directly touch our lives is not what it does any more. It wants to do the data processing, the heavy lifting in the cloud. You might buy an IoT device from anyone; Microsoft wants to be the one that processes the data. Microsoft calls this its Power Platform.

Will this work? Well, Wall Street thinks so, but its view is mostly based on the previous quarter's earnings; Microsoft will be in favour as long as it continues to do well in cloud services. There are other types of cloud on the horizon, though, including tougher legal restrictions on the use of data. Maybe Microsoft hopes to bulldoze its way past such obstacles: its current strategy is clearly working. A five-year hindsight would be wonderful to have right now, however.

Who would have thought that an online bookshop would end up winning the AI game? Google and Apple are playing catch-up, but Amazon's Alexa is way out in front. The company's almighty retail presence, and its ability to sustain deep price cuts, has helped make Alexa unstoppable.

Once the Echo is settled in your home, though, what exactly do you use it for? For many of us, Alexa is little more than an interactive replacement for the radio. Yet there's a lot more that your always-listening, ever-ready assistant can do. Here's a guide to some of the clever ways you can customise the Echo and make the most of its extensive capabilities.

Change Alexa's wake word

Out of the box, your virtual assistant is called Alexa - but opening vowels can be problematic for some stammerers, and there's plenty of scope for confusion if you have a child or pet with the same name. Happily, while Google, Apple and Microsoft are quite precious about what you call their assistants, Amazon gives you options: instead of addressing your Echo as "Alexa", you can choose to say "Echo", "Amazon" or - for Star Trek fans - "Computer".

To change this setting, open the Alexa smartphone app, click Settings and tap on the device whose wake word you want to change. Click Edit on the wake word line and choose from the drop-down list. We're using "Alexa" throughout this feature, but obviously if you've chosen a different name then swap it as appropriate.

Set up Multi-Room Music

If you have multiple Echo devices in your home, you can easily stream one playlist or radio station to several (or all of them) at once. First though you need to put them into groups; you can do this within the Alexa app, by clicking Settings followed by Multi-Room Music.

You can create as many groups as you like, but note that each device can only appear in one group. So, if you have two Echo units downstairs and two upstairs, you could create a "downstairs" group for the first two - but you couldn't then also add them to a "whole house" group.

To set up your first group, all you need to do is tap the Create Group button, followed by Multi-Room Music, give the group a name and tick the boxes beside the devices that should be included.

Now, if you want to play music on your two downstairs Echo devices, you can simply say "Alexa, play Kylie downstairs". If Kylie's not to your taste, modify the instruction as appropriate.

Play podcasts with Alexa

You probably know that Alexa can stream music and digital radio stations - but did you know that she can also play podcasts? Alexa has a built-in ability to play podcasts through the TuneIn app - just say, for example; "Alexa, play Serial".

This skill, however, may be a bit limited for the true podcast enthusiast's tastes, lacking the ability to do things like subscribe to certain podcasts. If you want a bit more functionality, check out the AnyPod skill, which allows you to do things like subscribe to podcasts and play specific episodes.

Create multiple profiles

Alexa will listen to anyone - but that doesn't mean she has to treat everyone the same. If you set up separate profiles for each person in your household, you can switch between them to ensure that any music played, calendars accessed, and accounts used for shopping will be appropriate to that user.

Creating a new profile has to be done by the registered owner of the Echo device. Open Settings in the Alexa app, click Household Profile in the Settings section, then enter your account password. Now get the other member to log in using the same device and link your accounts.

One word of warning: when you tell Alexa to order an item from Amazon, the system will use whichever payment method is set up for the active profile - so to avoid mix-ups, it's worth checking before you place the order. To do so, just ask "Alexa, which profile is this?"

Protect your purchases

On the subject of voice purchases, if you've got kids in the house you'll probably want to set up a PIN code for online shopping, to ensure they don't order a box load of Lego every two weeks.

To do this, scroll down to Voice Purchasing in the Alexa app and add the code in the "Require voice code" field. This will need to be spoken when making a purchase -so make sure they don't overhear you.

Connect external devices

Everyone knows that the Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Show can stream music from various online sources. What you might not realise is that these devices can all also be used as external Bluetooth speakers, so you can - for example - use them to play music directly from your phone.

To make the connection, either search for the Echo device in your phone's Bluetooth menu, or make your phone discoverable and say "Alexa, pair Bluetooth" or "Alexa, pair phone". (Note that the Dot lacks this capability.)

Once connected, you can control the music with all the usual voice commands, including "play", "pause", "previous" and "next", and volume controls. To close the connection, say "Alexa, disconnect Bluetooth" or "Alexa, disconnect phone".

Use IFTTT with Alexa

You probably already know about the free-to-use automation service IFTTT - there's a guide to some useful business applications here. What's perhaps more handy is the numerous Alexa integrations the service now offers.

To get started, point your browser at ifttt.com/amazon_alexa and click Connect. Provide your password on the Amazon page that appears and authorise the connection. You can now use the pre-rolled applets to link Alexa to a huge range of services and devices - from a Roomba vacuum cleaner or a WeMo coffee maker to Facebook Messenger and Google spreadsheets.

In our view, one of the most useful integrations is between Alexa and Todoist: although Alexa has a native shopping-list feature, Todoist is more flexible and works across almost every platform imaginable.

To set it up, search IFTTT for "Todoist"; you should see an result entitled "Add your new Alexa to dos to Todoist". Click the Turn On toggle switch, and on the next screen, sign into your Todoist account to link it with IFTTT.

Next, select which Todoist project you'd like Alexa to add new entries to - we'd suggest the all-purpose 'inbox' list - and hit save. Now every time you ask Alexa to add an entry to your to-do list, it'll automatically appear in your Todoist inbox.

Create your own routine

If you frequently fire off the same string of commands in a row, why not create a routine, so you can launch the sequence with a single instruction?

To do this, tap Routines in the Alexa Account section of the Alexa app, followed by the "+" to get started. Tap "When this happens", then "When you say something" and type the trigger phrase. We're using "Alexa, open the office" to set up a routine that will run when we get to our desk in the morning.

Save the phrase, then tap "Add action" and choose what should happen from the News, Smart Home, Traffic and Weather options. For example, our routine turns on two lights and asks Alexa to tell us what the day's weather is.

Use Alexa remotely

Did you know that you can communicate with Alexa even when you aren't within range of its microphone? The Alexa app which is used to set up the device can also be used to launch remote commands from anywhere in the world, along with a host of other tasks.

Simply open the app and tap the Alexa logo in the centre of the navigation bar at the bottom to launch Alexa's voice recognition service, and tell her what you want. You can use any command that you'd use with the Echo itself, including turning on connected home devices like lights or plugs, playing music or answering general queries.

Make phone calls with Alexa

Setting up phone-call capabilities is only slightly more involved than setting up the Drop In function. First, open the Alexa app on your phone and tap the speech bubble on the toolbar. When you originally set up the app you'll have been asked for your phone number, and for authorisation to pull in your contacts from your address book - and now you should see them here.

To call or text one of these contacts, tap the person icon at the top of the screen, then tap their name. You'll see options to send a text or call. A texts will be read out by the recipient's Echo device, as well as appearing on their phone, while a phone call make their device ring so you can speak hands-free.

What if you don't want to be disturbed? Tap a name and use the "Allow Drop In" switch to enable or disable their access. Scroll to the bottom of their card and there's a link to block them if you need.

Make Skype calls with Alexa

If you're a business user that relies on Skype rather than traditional phone calls, don't worry - Alexa's got you covered. In the Alexa app, open up the settings and tap 'communication'. Tap on 'Skype' and then click the link to sign in to your Skype account.

Once your account is linked and authenticated, you can simply say "Alexa, call Frankie on Skype", and Alexa will initiate the call. If you've got an Echo device with a screen - i.e. the Echo Show, Echo Spot or a Kindle Fire tablet with Show Mode - you can even use it to make Skype video calls.

Personalise your Flash Briefing

A Flash Briefing is Amazon's name for a quick info dump that draws content from multiple sources, such as news publishers, weather forecasters and exchange rate trackers.

To set one up that's personalised just for you, open the Alexa app and click Flash Briefing in the Settings section. Click Get more Flash Briefing content and select the elements you'd like to add: you'll find options like BBC World Service, The Guardian, MTV and the Joke of the Day.

Each one you add will be automatically enabled, but you can remove any source from the briefing if you choose: just return to the Flash Briefing section and toggle the switch beside each one's name.

You can enable sports content within the Flash Briefing too - but Alexa already knows a lot about football and other sports. Click Sports Update on the Settings screen, then use the search box to find the teams you're interested in. As well as Premier League clubs, you'll also find local teams like Leatherhead and Taunton Town.

Tell Alexa where you are

Another way to personalise the information Alexa feeds you is by telling her where you live. The setup procedure asks you for a street, but a postcode works just as well, and will ensure you get accurate weather and travel information. This should be set for each device by clicking its name in the app's Settings section and entering the required details in the Device location section.

If you frequently make the same journey between two fixed points, you can also setup a custom traffic report. To set your start and end points, step back from the device settings and click Traffic in the Alexa Preferences section. Then, when you ask Alexa "what's the traffic like?", she'll respond with a full report.

Create custom Alexa skills with Blueprints

Have you ever wished you could program Alexa to give certain specific responses? Well, now you can! Amazon has launched a feature called 'Skill Blueprints', which essentially enables you to roll your own custom Alexa skills. There are various templates for creating skills for things like games and quizzes, inspirational quotes and chore rotas.

Our favourite Blueprint is one for letting guests know all the essential information they'll need. The example is based around information for house-guests, such as how to turn the TV on and where the toilet paper's kept, but it works equally well as an information point for offices.

For instance, you can configure it to respond to questions like "Alexa, what's the Wi-Fi password?" or "Alexa, how does the coffee machine work?". No more having to answer the same questions over and over again!

To set up a Blueprint, go to blueprints.amazon.co.uk and sign in with your Amazon account, then pick the Blueprint you want to use as a starting point, then following the step-by-step setup and configuration guide.

Say goodbye, Alexa

If you're upgrading from a Dot to a Plus, or from a regular Alexa to a Show, you might be tempted to pass your old device on to a friend, or sell it online. Before you do, make sure you deregister it so that the new owner can't place online orders using your account.

To do this, open the Alexa app, click Settings, then click on the name of the device you're getting rid of. You'll find the deregistration option in the About section. You don't have to worry about the record that Alexa keeps of thing you've said to her: this won't follow the device to its new home.

But if you ever want to purge this information from your own account, you can delete individual recordings from the home page of the Alexa app, or switch to your Amazon account to delete the whole lot.

To do this, log in at amazon.co.uk, click Your Account, and find the link to Manage Your Content and Devices. Switch to the Your Devices tab, click the three dots beside the names of each of your Echo speakers, and choose Manage voice recordings on each one. Read the disclaimer and, if you want to proceed, click Delete to wipe the slate clean.

Alexa," you say to your home voice assistant, coughing as a cold starts to catch up to you. "I'm hungry cough what recipe should I cough try?" Alexa suggests some chicken soup, and asks: "By the way, would you like to order cough drops with one-hour delivery?"

That's the future of context-aware computing that Amazon envisions with its Alexa voice assistant, according to a recently filed patent application. Not only will Alexa be able to translate your coughs, sniffles, sneezes and wheezes into symptoms of a cold, but it will also consider your "emotional condition". It will then detect whether you sound sad or excited so it can "determine relevant audio or visual content for presentation to the user," in the dry language of the patent filing.

The idea behind context-aware computing isn't to simply analyse one aspect, such as a cough in a voice: Amazon's filing suggests it's also considering listening to background sounds as well as using a combination of behavioural targeting criteria, including your browsing history, what pages you click on and what you buy. That's no surprise that sort of algorithmic stalking is Amazon's modus operandi, after all but with smart assistants slipping into our homes, voice controls in our cars and smartphones in our pockets, the data collection is increasing.

Amazon's context-based patent suggests Alexa can determine your "emotional condition"

For example, carrying a smartphone everywhere and using it to plan a journey lets Google Now make proactive suggestions, notifying users that they should leave for work a bit earlier because there's traffic on their normal route. That requires knowing not only where your home and workplace are, and how you commute, but also pulling in external data from transport providers.

As more and more data is collected, such systems become increasingly powerful. "There's a lot of new data that's coming in," said Erick Brethenoux, an analyst with Gartner. "It's linked to the Internet of Things, to Fitbit and all these different wearable devices, and... clothes with sensors built in. We can see that there's a lot more data that allows us context."

Any system that's making assumptions about our mental or emotional states will make mistakes, of course. Amazon may assume a listener is streaming a playlist of sad songs because they're emotionally low, but if it can listen in via your speaker then it may realise you just really like singing along to melodramatic power ballads while cleaning the kitchen. More data means more context, so rather than suggest gin on one-hour delivery, Amazon may instead proffer tickets to a local karaoke night.

Context and costs

Context-aware computing can be helpful, but it can also be intrusive. As ever, companies using such techniques need to be wary of privacy.

"Every single application needs to have an explicit opt in," said Brethenoux. "You need to be aware of what information is gathered about you, how it is going to be used, and how long it's going to be kept. You have the right, of course, to modify, delete and stop it at any time."

The Vibrosight project uses lasers to identify when you're doing activities such as walking on a treadmill

That will help to assuage concerns, but Brethenoux notes that developers should always be careful of how people react to such technologies.

"We have to be very sensitive to the impact that this has on people and not make assumptions."

Context-aware computing can be more useful than simply boosting your spending. Brethenoux gives an example of an insurance company in Chicago that notifies customers of extreme weather events such as hail, considering the context of whether that customer lives in an affected area and owns a vehicle.

"If they are in the path of the storm, the company can send a text telling them to move their car somewhere protected in the next ten or 15 minutes," Brethenoux said. "Hail causes tremendous damage [to cars]."

Insurees aren't punished for failing to bring their car under cover, but it helps the company avoid some damage payouts, meaning it can keep costs down.

Cutting down on tech

And Brethenoux argues that context-aware computing, if used well, could actually reduce our use of technology.

"I think those techniques, such as context-aware, should be used not for more communication but for less communication," he said. "Those things should actually free us... we're tired of being buzzed and beeped at to death, because it's constantly coming at us. Why don't we use context to diminish the number of notifications?"

For example, Alexa could understand from what it can hear that you're in a meeting, or having dinner with family, or enjoying a bit of peace and quiet, so opt not to interrupt you. Or context awareness could be used for simple, helpful tasks. Some smart TVs controversially have cameras in them to look at who is sitting on the sofa watching, for example to target advertising. That camera could be used to see if someone is even watching anymore, and if not and the time is late, perhaps switch off the TV entirely, rather than leave it on standby.

Context could help make computing more helpful, Brethenoux added. "It's linked to another concept in computing that is starting to see a resurgence called 'software agents'," he said. "They are self-contained programmes that can do a few simple tasks on your behalf."

Those agents can use context awareness to know when we need to see a message or notification, and when we don't. "I think it's important to be able to get the right things at the right moment, and sometimes decide not to act," said Brethenoux.

Tech that actually knows when to shut up? That's a skill we would love Alexa et al to have.

How many conversations have you had with a chatbot in the last three months? Chances are that you might not have a clue.

As consumers, we take interaction with online services in our stride, and don't tend to recall how many of them we have in total, let alone how many are with human beings and how many with chatbots. In fact, in some cases, we might not always be able to tell the difference.

Ultimately, does it even matter whether we're talking to people or bots, so long as the experience is smooth and the job gets done? Well, from a data protection standpoint, it certainly does.

Chatbots are the future

Opinions vary on how widespread chatbots will be in the near future, but whichever way you slice and dice the stats, we're in the midst of a revolution. Analyst firm Gartner expects that by 2020 a quarter of all customer service operations will use what it calls 'virtual customer assistants', while IBM has said that by the same year 85% of all customer interaction will be handled without a human involved.

There are plenty of reasons why companies are favouring AI-powered bots over humans. They don't need a lot of training, they can strip away queues as there is always a slot can always be allocated for a customer at any given time, and they're capable of running 24 hours a day.

Consumers too are becoming to favour using a chatbot over having to deal with a person. Customer satisfaction rises by 33% when bots are used, according to Gartner, and lead to a 70% reduction in call/chat or email enquiries.

Listen and learn

There is no doubt AI can make inferences or deductions about us on the basis of our interactions. "This is relatively trivial to accomplish if there is a substantial dataset behind the AI interface," explains Steffen Sorrell, principal analyst at Juniper Research.

Mark Stephen Meadows, trustee and co-founder of Seed Token, an open source AI framework, explains to IT Pro: "The way I said the word can be modelled and this is of particular relevance when the user utters a phrase or sentence. [Using] over 200 other vectors (like your gender, age, etc) these listening systems can detect 'affect' or 'sentiment' or, simply, emotion. This offers deep insights into the mental state of the user."

AI doesn't even need our words. The University of Vermont has identified signs in Instagram pictures that might indicate depression. Yet advancements like these are raising questions among the research community as to whether the right to data privacy is being impeded.

A question of ethics

Perhaps this is a question of power symmetry the idea that the company and chatbot are in a stronger position in comparison to the consumer.

"We have a potential problem," Meadows explains to IT Pro. "Artificial intelligence quickly becomes unethical because of its capacity to accumulate more information on the person than the person has about the system." A great deal of this gathering is passive in order to inform the training of the AI, and is not always covered by consent.

Steffen Sorrell of Juniper Research suggests the example of a short-term lending company offering its services to a user who had previously expressed concerns about their financial situation to an AI chatbot.

"Most consumers would consider their reasonable expectations of privacy for such a sensitive issue to have been breached," explains Sorrell. "That changes, however, if the user has explicitly given his or her consent for this kind of information sharing."The UK Information Commissioner agrees. A spokesperson told us: "Wherever personal data is being processed, data protection law applies. Organisations are required to process personal data fairly, lawfully and transparently, irrespective of the technology used. The key is that individuals are properly informed about the processing and are clear on how they can exercise their rights."

A clash with GDPR

Companies should continue to ensure that a policy of data protection by design is followed even in the case of AI development, according to the ICO.

"When looking into certain technologies, organisations should ensure that they follow a data protection by design approach and, if necessary, undertake a data protection impact assessment. This allows them to ensure that their processing complies with the fundamental data protection principles."

Where the General Data Protection Regulations pertain which is for any company processing data on EU citizens users have improved controls over what information about them is shared. However, Sorrell argues that a lack of information, in a format that's easily understood by the general public, means that users are unlikely to know the full scope of the new powers.

For example, "even in the context of the GDPR, few consumers will understand that they have a right to ask for an explanation of any algorithmically-based decision," he explains.

Meadows' Seed Token project is designed to counter the traditional idea of organisations owning the data that AI generates and instead uses blockchain and open source to allow users to specify their privacy and data sharing preferences. It's pitched as a tool that can reset the balance by taking power away from a select few organisations currently commanding the AI space, opening up development and allowing for greater collaboration between users and developers.

It's a noble idea, but one that is likely to struggle given the highly contested and lucrative market that conversational AI is going to ignite over the coming years. The current trajectory suggests we are going to spend more and more time interacting with bots in the coming few years. The AI behind them is likely to generate more and more knowledge about us including inferences that we aren't necessarily aware of.

It appears as if this emerging conversational AI industry could well be on a collision course with GDPR. Just as the IoT, which enjoyed years of passive information gathering as part of its makeup, was labelled as being "irreconcilable with GDPR" by the UK's own data protection authority, so too might chatbots in the coming years.

As part of Amazon's launch of new smart home products, the firm also lifted the lid on its Alexa Presentation Language (APL) that will allow developers to integrate Alexa with new screen-based products.

The language lets developers build voice-based apps such as images and video and customise them for display-based devices, such as smart displays, ambient screens, tablets, TVs, and more.

APL will be available through two SDKs. The Alexa Smart Screen and TV SDK for Android provides an application package that brings Echo Show-like visual experiences to tablets, TVs, and other screen-based products. Amazon said the Android variant gives a device to the same technology behind the next generation Echo Show.

The other SDL is the Alexa Smart Screen and TV SDK for Linux. It said this SDK includes new capabilities and a new web-based visual runtime that renders the new visual skills and interactions authored using APL.

Amazon also launched its Alexa Smart Screen Dev Kit, a hardware and software reference suite for screen-based products with Alexa built-in. This features an ARM Cortex-A53 chipset that hosts the Alexa client software and audio front-end technology for 'Alexa' wake word detection. It features a 4-inch touchscreen, a 3-mic array for far-field speech recognition, the Amazon wake word engine, and includes the new Alexa Smart Screen and TV Device SDK and a sample voice-forward GUI.

"Because the new SDK and dev kit were built using the same core technology from the all-new Echo Show, device makers can build a truly differentiated products while continuing to deliver a more consistent experience. We cannot wait to see what they create," said Pete Thompson, vice president of Alexa Voice Service

Among the manufacturers using APL in their products are Lenovo, which has used Alexa Smart Screen and TV Device SDK for Android in beta to develop the Lenovo Smart Tabs. Sony is also said to be collaborating on integration with Amazon Echo. Customers will be able to talk to Alexa through the Echo and see TV responses on music and camera feeds.

Commercial device makers interested in using the Alexa Smart Screen and TV Device SDK can sign-up to request an invite to the developer preview.

Pushing Alexa further and farther appears to be a major focus for Amazon, as highlighted by Geoff Blaber, vice president of research for CCS Insight's Americas division.

"Amazon is doubling down on its strategy of integrating Alexa far and wide into appliances, consumer electronics and cars. It's notable that Amazon is not just relying on pre-integration in new products, but enabling existing home appliances and devices through connectors and adapters in an effort to drive utility and usage," Blaber said in a statement sent to IT Pro.

"Alexa benefits from the same network effect as a Facebook or Twitter. The more devices and appliances that are connected to Alexa, the more useful it becomes. Amazon is maximizing this through a huge range of new APIs, features, devices and companion hardware that promise to extend Alexa's role in the home and car."

Dictation software has come a long way since the early days of dodgy speech transcriptions. Today there are incredibly sophisticated tools available that never fail to surprise with how accurate they are at translating even the most accented of human speech.

What's more, systems now offer users a dizzying array of functions, whether that's pinpoint accuracy, PC controls, collaboration tools, or even the option to sync your transcriptions to your PC so you can talk while you're on the go.

With all this added complexity, choosing the right platform for your needs is understandably difficult – so we've done the hard work and pulled together the most impressive software available.

Google Voice Typing

docs.google.com

Getting started with voice typing in Google Docs is as straightforward as you'd expect from a company whose home page is a white screen with a search bar: once you've opened a document, and selected 'Voice typing' from the drop-down Tools menu, just click the on-screen microphone and speak.

The tool is reasonably fast – there's a slight lag, because it uses cloud processing to figure out exactly what you're saying – but after a second or so, your words, punctuation and even formatting appear on the page. And Google is, by far, the most accurate of all contenders in this roundup.

We tested each tool by reading the opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler's 'The Big Sleep' five times, using both built-in and external microphones. Out of 84 words, Google Docs scored an average three errors; typically two typos and a dropped word.

With any free voice dictation software, it's recommended you run through the content afterwards, manually correcting mistakes – Google Voice Typing's impressive accuracy makes that job a lot easier, especially since right-clicking underlined words displays possible suggestions for misheard words. You can also use the 'Delete [word or phrase]' command to make corrections on the fly.

There's more to Voice Typing than actual typing. You can highlight words, insert tables and shift around the page by ordering the cursor to relevant sections. This helps maintain your flow, rather than breaking it as you pause to grab the mouse. Visit Google's support page for the full list of voice instructions.

How it can be improved

The biggest irritation is that Voice Typing is locked to Chrome. Try to access the option in any other browser and you'll find it greyed out. Currently, the tool's only available for Docs and for adding speaker notes to Slides. We'd like to see speech recognition rolled out to other Google products – it seems a logical evolution, considering the rise of smart speakers such as Google Home.

Verdict

Google Voice Typing delivers an effortless and impressively accurate speech-to-text experience. Despite being blocked on non-Chrome browsers, its sleek presentation and admirable performance makes it far less frustrating than similar tools, and a joy to use.

Features: 4

Performance: 5

Ease of use: 5

Overall: 5

Microsoft Dictate

dictate.ms

At first glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Dictate – a Microsoft Garage project created by developers in their downtime – is a needless add-on. After all, Windows already builds Speech Recognition into various Office products.

But this voice-recognition tool, which is compatible with Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, harnesses the might of Microsoft's Cognitive Services, the online AI that fuels Cortana and Translator. That power means Dictate does what Speech Recognition has always struggled with: recognising speech.

Selecting the Dictation tab on the ribbon reveals a sparse interface featuring a Start/Stop button – click this and your spoken words whip along a Response bar, processed online, before appearing on-screen without too many mistakes; an average hit-rate of 80 out of 84 words.

Elsewhere, you'll find an option to switch to manual punctuation. But the stand-out feature is the translator that converts speech into all major languages as you speak.

How it can be improved

Dictate isn't the quickest horse in the stable, although it's fun to see your words gallop across the page three seconds after uttering them. There are some peculiar word choices, and, like Google, it occasionally typed 'comma' and 'full stop' where punctuation marks would suffice. The real deal-maker-or-breaker is that, in running on Microsoft Cognitive Services, Dictate only works online.

Verdict

Dictate is so good, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a fully fledged, Microsoft-supported product; not a homebrew piece of kit. Translation integration is expertly done and we wouldn't be surprised to see this become a true feature in later Office iterations.

Features: 4

Performance: 4

Ease of use: 5

Overall: 4

Braina Lite

Brainasoft.com

Braina Lite – the free version of an otherwise paid-for tool – is an AI-based virtual assistant, which is capable of opening files and programs on your computer. It might not steal the crowns of Google and Cortana, but that's down to poor design, rather than performance.

The tool barely stumbles when transcribing. Faster than its rivals, Braina Lite delivered the same overall accuracy as Google. But the tool is flawed, since you need to copy and paste captured words into your word processor separately.

Dictation mode should let you directly dictate into third-party software such as Word, but the software demands a full purchase to use this feature – along with several others. At least if your microphone isn't up to scratch, you can grab the Siri-style app (iOS and Android).

This easily connects to a computer on the same network, and even packs in a virtual keyboard and mouse, should you need to give your jaws a rest.

How it can be improved

We rarely come across software that so completely locks down the menu bar; almost every button slotted at the top of the screen is out-of-bounds in the free version. Instead, you need to manually type such commands as 'Dictation mode on'. This is stunningly counter-intuitive for a voice-controlled tool.

Verdict

Voice-activated computer control is a breeze here, and far more responsive than Windows Speech Recognition. But the constant harassment to buy the product buries otherwise excellent features, and we found Braina Lite too limited in its free form.

Features: 3

Performance: 5

Ease of use: 4

Overall: 3

Best of the rest

Windows Speech Recognition

products.office.com

Built into various Microsoft Office products, Windows Speech Recognition offers voice typing, as well as letting you entirely control your computer. However, you'll need to dedicate time to training the tool to learn your vocal idiosyncrasies to get the most from it. Our experience was hit-and-miss – although it never failed to deliver the correct punctuation, plenty of the words in-between were horribly garbled.

Speech Notes

speechnotes.co

This browser-based speech recognition tool is powered by Google's own back-end servers, but the only similarity with Google Voice Typing is the requirement to use Chrome.

Elsewhere, expect poorly transcribed words and disdain for proper grammar. We did find it worked okay when speaking slowly and pausing after each sentence – at which point, it's probably quicker to just write it down.

Speech to Text Converter

microsoft.com

Speech to Text Converter does what it says on the tin. Available from the Microsoft Store, it's a no-frills, no-nonsense app. The simple interface, which imitates the dark Windows 10 theme, features just a text box, Start button and an option to clear text. It's perfect for making a quick note that can be pasted into a word processor, but the overall accuracy just isn't dependable enough.

Alexa could soon be making its way into your car after Amazon released a toolkit for developers to integrate the voice assistant into vehicles.

The Alexa Auto SDK has been made available on GitHub with Alexa's core functions, such as media streaming, smart home controls and third-party skills. New features specifically for cars, such as navigation, are also available.

"Amazon wants Alexa to be available in as many parts of our lives as possible. It has been working with individual automakers for a while. But the release of the Alexa auto software tools opens the market up, enabling all automotive players to offer Alexa working with a wide range of the car's infotainment functions," said Martin Garner, SVP at CCS Insight.

"Car makers are in the middle of a large transition to make the car's cockpit an integral part of our daily digital lives. An intelligent voice interface is a perfect fit, and a huge boost to their ambitions as infotainment systems become ever more complicated."

Voice assistants in cars were made a popular fantasy in the 80's with David Hasselhoff's Knight Rider TV series that featured a Pontiac Trans Am with an onboard AI called KITT that was able to to have natural-language conversations with the driver.

While that childhood fantasy is still far off in the future, connected cars with the same functions you might find in the smart home are fast becoming reality. Amazon has already been working with car manufacturers such as Ford, BMW and Toyota to integrate the voice assistant in vehicles.

However, the source code for Alexa has been opened up for all to use. The SDK will allow for streaming media from Amazon Music and other popular radio stations and will allow you to make phone calls by saying the name of the person you'd like to speak to, as you would with your Amazon Echo.

There is a local search feature that lets you search for restaurants, cinemas, supermarkets, hotels, specific addresses and points of interest like landmarks.

Alexa could be in cars by the end of the year, with Toyota building the voice assistant into its Entune 3.0 infotainment system and Panasonic also said to be bringing Alexa to its own future in-car infotainment system.

Anker and Garmin are also said to be working on devices that plug into cars to bring Alexa to older models.

How do you know it's me writing this column and not some terrifyingly literate algorithm? It's not as if AI hasn't already branched into journalism.

Go to any financial news website and the vast majority of the stories about earnings reports will have been written without any human intervention. Sure, the style is dryer than a Jacob's cracker, but the algorithm doesn't call in sick, need a pension or drink heroic quantities of tea on the company's tab.

You know this column is written by me because no algorithm could write similes as weak as the one in the last sentence. There's something quintessentially human about my prose. It's grammatically imperfect, hackneyed, full of all the flaws that only a 40-year-old dragged up through an Essex comprehensive could get away with.

But the video I've just watched (below) makes me wonder whether the day when it's hard to distinguish between humans and AI isn't that far away, after all. The video in question is Google's demo of Duplex, the company's voice-assisted butler. Want to book an appointment at your hairdresser's between 4 and 6 pm next Friday? There's no need to phone Flavio any more - just tell Google when you want the appointment and it will ring on your behalf.

The chilling part of Google's demo is the way its voice assistant imitates a human. Not only does it respond convincingly to the questions posed by the person answering the phone - even when the conversation veers off track - but its speech is full of the umms and ahhs that normally distinguish a human caller from the automated voice bots. Google is trying to con the caller into thinking they're talking to a real human being.

You can understand why Google's done that. We've all grown so sick of automated calls from "lawyers" who have heard we've been in a car accident that our knee-jerk response to an automated call is to hang up. But at a time when trust in tech companies is at an all-time low, conning people into thinking they're dealing with a real person is a spectacularly dumb idea that could well kill Duplex before it's even been launched.

To be fair, Google seems to be wrestling with the ethics. In a faintly contradictory blog post, it says "transparency is key" to the service's success, while in the same paragraph claiming that the "technology is built to sound natural, to make the conversation experience comfortable".

I don't know about you, but I'm more comfortable when people are being honest with me. I'd have no problem with Google Duplex ringing me up to book one of my photography courses on a customer's behalf if it declared it was an automated service from the get-go. I'd be less inclined to complete the booking if I wasn't sure it was Google calling, if it was something that sounded eerily like a human being but isn't. Because no matter how good Google makes Duplex, there will always be little tells that you're dealing with a computer. The unnatural pauses; the refusal of the tech to speak over you like a human would; the absence of empathy, humour or local dialect.

There are practical issues too. When someone rings to book one of my courses, we talk about what camera they've got, how much photographic experience they have, whether they know the meeting place next to Brighton's West Pier. Duplex isn't going to know all this stuff. In much the same way, it will be flummoxed when Flavio's Saturday girl asks if you want a blow dry or whether you're okay to have your roots touched up by Gina because Flavio is on holiday in Tenerife (you can't deny my hairdresser clichs are top drawer).

But what really bites me about Google Duplex is how over-engineered the solution to this problem is. The sample conversations that Google provided are all about basic booking transactions: an appointment at the hairdresser's, a reservation at a restaurant, enquiring about the opening hours of a store. None of these should require a telephone conversation in the first place, let alone one where Google has to pretend to be a human.

I've got a Google Assistant on my desk and on my phone. If I tell it to book me a table at Pizza Express for 1 pm tomorrow, it should be able to ferret into Pizza Express's booking system, check availability, and either book me in or tell me it's full. This isn't ground-breaking - almost every ticket booking or restaurant chain website lets you do this. What we need is standardised automatic booking systems, and who's in a better position to implement one than Google?

When I can ask Google to find me the best deal on a restaurant on a quiet Monday night and it can come back with eight suggestions of places with spaces, then you've got a technology that solves a problem for me as a consumer and for the business owner. We've no need for Duplex's duplicity. We just need something simple.

Image: Shutterstock

An AI-powered robot is currently on its way to space to help International Space Station (ISS) astronauts carry out repair missions, NASA has announced.

CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) was placed aboard a SpaceX rocket, which took off on Friday as part of a resupply mission to the ISS.

CIMON is a voice-activated piece of kit that can display instructions to fix parts of the spacecraft without an astronaut having to use their hands at all. The robot is ball-shaped, with a screen that resembles a face, it can fly thanks to tech developed by Airbus, and can recognise voices using IBM's Watson tech. It'll also guide crew on research projects or experiments, with everything stored in a huge database.

Although it's pretty smart, it'll have to pass a few training projects before it can be used for the more important tasks, NASA explained. German astronaut Alexander Gerst will be in charge of testing its intelligence using CIMON to experiment with crystals and a Rubik's cube. He will also test its capabilities as part of a medical experiment, where the robot will be expected to fly and record footage.

The robot has already been programmed to respond to Gerst's voice, saving time once it arrives at the ISS, so he can commence testing whether AI could have a future helping astronauts in volatile environments. If the collaboration between IBM, Airbus, the German Aerospace Center and Ludwig-Maximilian University Hospital in Munich is successful, it could give the go-ahead for others to develop AI robots for use in space.

"The aim of the CIMON project is to examine the current capabilities of artificial intelligence in a complex environment such as the International Space Station, in order to provide the best possible support to people in such conditions," said Matthias Biniok, IBM's lead Watson architect in Germany.

"These skills can be individually trained and enhanced within the context of their respective application. Artificial intelligence also makes particular use of artificial neural networks."

The partnership is somewhat ironic given SpaceX founder Elon Musk's staunch criticism of artificial intelligence and its potential to replace human workers. He once described work in the field as "summoning the devil", and last year said the technology posed an existential threat to humanity.

Image: Shutterstock

Lancashire Police has turned to Amazon Alexa to help get messages out to local residents, building an app to send any news updates to users of the smart speaker.

The voice-activated Alexa skill is available to download from the Amazon store and will provide hourly updates to those who sign up to receive the latest local news and information on their Echo device. It'll also beam pictures of wanted criminals to speakers in the area, for those users with an Echo Show, urging residents to get in contact if they have any information about the whereabouts of them or crimes committed.

"As a police force we are always looking at ways to engage with our communities," PC Rob Flanagan, Lancashire Constabulary's innovations manager said. "Alexa works alongside traditional policing methods to inform the public about the important issues in their neighbourhoods.

"Voice-activated searches now account for 10% of online searches and are expected to rise to 50% by 2020. We want to be at the forefront of this new technology to make it easier for the public to access the information they want to know."

Flanagan worked with developers at Amazon to come up with the application and, although neither he nor Amazon were able to predict how many users the new service would have, it's estimated that 11 million people in Lancashire use an Alexa-enabled device.

Lancashire Police is hoping that embracing new technologies such as the Echo to help with its crime-busting efforts will encourage new recruits. The launch of the Alexa app coincides with a recruitment drive for the police force, which will hopefully result in onboarding 200 new officers between now and next year.

Image: Shutterstock

American tech firm Facebook has confirmed it's to close down its artificial intelligence bot M after just two years in operation.

Launched in 2015, Facebook made the virtual assistant available to around 2,000 people living in California through its IM service Messenger. However, according to a report by The Verge, Facebook will kill off the service on 19 January.

Facebook said that the employees used to train the text-based system over the past few years will soon be offered new jobs, although it's not clear which roles they will be reassigned to.

Although availability of the service has been limited, it's been popular among users. Using AI algorithms as well as help from humans, it could complete an array of tasks.

For example, users could ask it to make plans and issue payments. Facebook explained that such capabilities will continue in M Suggestions, a separate service from the social media giant.

When Facebook launched the service two years ago, Facebook said it was a "beta" technology. However, it was originally keen to bring the service to more users.

The company quickly changed its stance, though. It never did expand the service, and after announcing that it would close, Facebook called the assistant an "experiment.

In a statement, the firm said: "Today we shared with the people who have access to our M closed beta project, first announced in August 2015, that January 19th is the last day the service will be available."

Facebook launched M with the aim of it competing with the likes of Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant. The social media network designed the system in a way so that it would improve over time.

"We launched this project to learn what people needed and expected of an assistant, and we learned a lot," added the firm.

"We're taking these useful insights to power other AI projects at Facebook. We continue to be very pleased with the performance of M suggestions in Messenger, powered by our learnings from this experiment."

Carwyn Edwards, a software engineer and systems architect at Bangor University, said he suspects that "their AI team has been redeployed to work on policy enforcement".

He added: "Voice and personal assistants are a tiny part of AI. The other possibility is that they have a partnership looming with another company with an assistant."

Image: Shutterstock

Voice commands will transform the way we interact with office devices and backend IT infrastructure, according to AWS, which is bringing Alexa into the workplace.

The voice assistant, which sits inside Amazon's Echo speakers, is coming to work with the initial aim of simplifying meetings.

Speaking at AWS re:Invent 2017, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said: "Meetings are always starting late, because you have to connect your laptop, you have to guide in through the conference system ... it's a nightmare.

"Alexa for Business is a fully managed service for having many Alexa devices at work, to manage the users, to manage unique skills you may have, and to work.

"You no longer ever have to type in a conference ID - you can say, 'hey Alexa, start a meeting', because it knows which room you're in and which meeting should be taking place there."

Integrations with the likes of Cisco and Polycom ensure Alexa works with their conferencing services. Wogels also outlined calendar integrations and connections to office printers to simplify printing.

But there's also a string of other integrations: with on-premise Exchange email, Office 365 and G Suite productivity tools, and line-of-business applications from Salesforce, which users can ask questions of through Alexa, to SAP's HR-focused SuccessFactors and expenses software Concur.

Users can even put queries to their Splunk analytics environment.

For AWS, and Vogels in particular, voice is the natural way to communicate with IT applications and infrastructure, even databases - more so than by frantically clicking on a mouse and tapping on a keyboard.

"Voice is the first disruption that will happen driven by the capabilities of deep learning tools," Vogels said. "It's a natural way of interacting with your systems. It will also mean that you're going to build your backend systems with them."

Alexa for Business will also enable IT departments to manage and provision 25 Alexa-enabled devices at a time, and assign skills like the integrations mentioned above, or integrations they build themselves, and manage who can use them.

"The next-generational systems will be built with conversational interfaces," Vogels said. "This will become the main interface to your systems."

Alois Reitbauer, VP and chief technical strategist at Dynatrace, which is partnering with AWS to offer performance monitoring of Alexa voice interactions, told IT Pro that voice will play a big part in the office, but it won't replace other forms of communication.

"The feedback we get is that especially DevOps teams and development teams would rather interact via [instant messaging] chat, and that's also why we have a Slack integration as well," he said."A situation where voice makes sense is a stand-up meeting in the morning - everyone comes in, they have to stand up, they want to ask a question, ad hoc, about something and it's easy to ask a question [to Alexa], go back to chat and then bring it up [the answer]."

Dynatrace has its own AI assistant, davis, that troubleshoots IT issues, sitting behind Alexa and Slack as frontends for technical queries.

"It's a mixed media interaction we'll see there," Reitbauer said, explaining that a verbal question could result in a text-based answer.

Cisco is aiming to take the headache out of meetings and conferencing,with the launch of a new AI-powered digital assistant for controlling its meeting-room hardware.

The new feature, Cisco Spark Assistant, will be integrated into the company's Cisco Spark conferencing equipment and used to perform tasks like joining a meeting, adjusting the volume and inviting participants via audio commands.

Cisco is planning to use initial customer interactions in order to gather data which can then be used to improve the service and introduce additional features, such as the ability to schedule meetings, compose meeting summaries and adding items to to-do lists.

Announced at Cisco's Partner Summit in Dallas, the company is looking for early adopters to trial the feature towards the start of next year, before it rolls it out to its wider customer base.

The feature operates in a similar way to existing digital assistants such as Alexa or Siri, but Cisco says it's not planning to branch out to cover similar markets or use-cases. Instead, the company is planning to concentrate their efforts on meeting-room applications.

The technology behind the Spark Assistant comes from AI and language-processing specialists MindMeld. Cisco purchased the company back in May for the princely sum of $125 million.

AI has become something of a hot button topic in modern IT, with the CBI advocating for the creation of a government commission in order to analyse the impact of AI and automation on UK jobs.

Intel and Amazon are working together on a developer kit, aimed at making it easier for third party developers to include Amazon Alexa Voice Service on their own devices.

The Intel Speech Enabling Developer Kit aims to provide the hardware components for voice control so that all developers will have to do is write the applications for the hardware, which is said to be the first "audio front end solution" for the combining of voice processing and wake work detection on one chipset.

The kit includes high-performance algorithms for echo cancellation and noise reduction, allowing the device to work even in noisy environments.

It also has Intel's mic circular array and its dual DSP (digital signal processing) with inference engine.

"People speak and hear in 360 degrees, not just in a direct line of sight. Devices need array microphones and complex noise mitigation technology. A quality voice interaction means devices identify the speaker's location, mitigate and suppress ambient noise, and understand spoken commands on the mics, even while playing music, as well as waking up when it hears the wake word," said Miles Kingston, the general manager of the Smart Home Group at Intel.

With Amazon wanting to see its Alexa technology in more and more devices, this new collaboration seems to be pushing the world further into the smart home era.

"We can all look forward to a wave of innovation from the developer community as we transition from being simply connected to being truly smart," Kingston said.

The new kit is available for pre-order starting today for $399, although the cost will raise $100 after the presale window closes.

Whatever you use to perform web searches, whether it's your mobile, tablet or desktop, it's likely it's all about to change. Soon, you'll be scrapping the keyboard and reaching for the voice activation button instead - that's if predictions from analyst firm Gartner and Comscore are correct.

For example, Gartner thinks that by 2020, 30% of web browsing sessions will be carried out without a screen and this means voice will begin its quest to take over from the keyboard (whether virtual on a smartphone or hardware on a desktop).

"New audio-centric technologies, such as Google Home and Amazon's Echo, are making access to dialogue-based information ubiquitous and spawning new platforms based on "voice-first" interactions," the company said in its report into 2017 trends.

Comscore is a little more optimistic, saying it thinks 50% of searches will be made by voice by 2020.

Thanks to the introduction of voice assistants such as Amazon Echo, Apple Siri, Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana, tech innovators are deeming the keyboard defunct, instead encouraging everyone to use their voice to search the internet.

What is voice search?

Voice search allows you to simply read out what you'd like to search for. It's usual for a variety of things, whether you want to find out information using a search engine, directions to a meeting or want your virtual voice assistant to call someone for you, rather than having to type a search into Google, Bing or any other search engine of your choice, find a phone number or address of your next meeting manually.

You'll usually need to say a command first, such as "OK, Google" to trigger the speech recognition software to start running, but once you get confirmation it's listening, you can simply speak your request.

Your words are sent to servers, de-scrambled using speech recognition algorithms working in tandem with machine learning to identify the pattern of speech and then this information is sent to the search engine to perform the search, trawl your device for the meeting you're supposed to be traveling to or your contacts to find who you want to call.

The response then pings back to the server, where it's either presented as a web page to your device, it performs the action, or, if you're using a speaker such as Google Home or Amazon Echo, it'll transform back into natural speech and be amplified for your entire family to hear. All of this happens in seconds - you won't even notice the process behind it even happened.

How popular is voice search?

Although technology firms would have us believe voice search is going to soon outstrip the number of people using typed search to find what they're looking for, Google has revealed the technology still only accounts for approximately 20% of all searches performed on its Android and mobile apps. Overall, across all platforms, just 12% of searches are made using voice, according to the tech giant.

However, Google voice search queries increased by 35x in 2016 compared to 2008, showing it is an increasingly used technology.

Why is voice search becoming so ubiquitous?

The main reason why voice search is set to grow is the introduction of keyboardless devices and assistants powering up your smart home. We're referring to Google Home, Amazon Echo and other devices including your smartphone and tablet that connect to your media, the internet and generally help you plan your life.

Accuracy is also improving considerably, which makes more people want to use voice search. Google claims its voice recognition accuracy is now at 92% (last year it was 75%) and although this means you're still likely to get some inaccurate results filtering through, the more people that use voice search to power their lives, the more the algorithms behind them will learn what you're asking for, producing relevant and better results.

Research by Gartner has predicted 20% of smartphone user conversations will happen with virtual personal assistants (VPAs) by 2019.

As the usage of VPAs such as Siri and Google Now increases, such platforms will become more intelligent, helping smartphone users complete tasks in more intuitive ways.

At present, 42% of people in the US and 32% in the UK have used a VPA on their smartphone over the last three months, while 37% use the feature on their smartphone at least once a day.

"The role of interactions will intensify through the growing popularity of VPAs among smartphone users and conversations made with smart machines," said Annette Zimmermann, research vice president at Gartner.

VPAs are becoming part of everyday life, Gartner explained, with hitting the Google Now button or launching up Siri becoming second nature when users want to find out when their next meeting is, what the weather will be like tomorrow or if they need to call someone from their phone book.

These functions are just scratching the surface though and researchers expect new technologies such as AI and machine learning to be one of the major strategic battlegrounds from 2017 onwards. The company even went as far to say that VPAs will lead to the end of apps as we know it, which will instead become integrated into VPA technology.

Another trend revealed in Gartner's annual mobile apps survey was the way in which people use their voice and gestures to control their smartphones. By 2020, the research firm thinks zero-touch UIs will be available on two billion devices and IoT endpoints.

"Interactions will move away from touchscreens and will increasingly make use of voice, ambient technology, biometrics, movement and gestures," Zimmermann explained.

"In this situation, apps using contextual information will become a crucial factor in user acceptance, as a voice-driven system's usability increases dramatically according to how much it knows about the user's surrounding environment. This is where device vendors' assets or partnerships in VPAs, natural language processing (NLP) and deep machine learning experts will matter."

Main image credit: Bigstock

An industry-wide organisation including five Silicon Valley giants has been formed to promote the fair and ethical development of artificial intelligence technologies.

The organisation aims to "conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research" rather that directly lobby legislators, and will focus on "ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology".

The group - known as the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society - includes Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM, with academic and non-profit organisations expected to join in the near future.

"Over the past five years, we've seen tremendous advances in the deployment of AI and cognitive computing technologies," said IBM AI ethics researcher, Francesca Rossi, "ranging from useful consumer apps to transforming some of the world's most complex industries, including healthcare, financial services, commerce and the Internet of Things."

"This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century - one that will foster collaboration between people and machines to solve some of the world's most enduring problems - in a way that is both trustworthy and beneficial."

The five member companies all have sophisticated and well-known AI research divisions working on the technology. Amazon this week launched its AI-powered smart home assistant, the Amazon Echo, in the UK, and Google's DeepMind AI subsidiary made headlines earlier this year by beating the world champion at notoriously complicated Asian board game Go.

There are some notable holdouts from the project, however. OpenAI, which was co-founded by Elon Musk, does not appear to be part of the partnership, despite the fact that the two group's goals would at first glance appear to be highly complementary.

OpenAI is focused on the "positive human impact" that AI can have, with the organisation stating that "We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely".

Also not participating is Apple, which has been increasingly touting the sophistication of its digital assistant Siri. The AI-based system is now available across all of the company's devices, with an open SDK allowing developers to integrate it with their own apps, as well as Apple's stock software.

According to senior Partnership figures, however, the firm may not be absent for much longer. Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft's primary research lab and one of the group's two interim co-chairs, said "we've been in discussions with Apple," according to The Guardian, adding "I know they're enthusiastic about this effort, and I'd personally hope to see them join."

The original creators of Siri, the virtual assistant Apple acquired in 2010, have unveiled a new voice assistant called Viv, which does not rely on any app nor require the user to even touch their phone.

Viv works entirely through voice commands, the Washington Post reports, allowing people to do things such as book tickets or order food from start to finish without ever tapping or typing on their phone, or downloading any third-party app.

The product is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and large volumes of data, with the ambition to completely revolutionise the way consumers interact with services and businesses online.

Dag Kittlaus, co-creator (along with colleague Adam Cheyer) of Viv, said: "It's about taking the way that humans have naturally interacted with each other for thousands of years and applying that to the way they interact with services. Everyone knows how to hold a conversation."

Viv will reportedly be revealed next week and has already secured $12.5 million in funding. It has also partnered with 50 companies including Uber, Grubhub and SeatGuru.

The technology has tech giants Google and Facebook interested in acquiring the service, according to the WSJ, as companies scramble to find the next big thing in AI technology. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already invested in Viv through Iconiq Capital.

"Our goal is ubiquity," Kittlaus added. "There's no way to predict where that goes except to say we'll pick the path that gets us there. Either way, we will finish the job."

Facebook launched it's own personal assistant for its Messenger service last year, offering an alternative to Siri, Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana. The service utilised human assistants alongside AI capabilities, allowing the service to learn enough to eventually be sophisticated enough to surpass the need for human intervention.

Apple recently hired at least 86 new AI specialists to work on Siri, hoping to make it 'smarter' than its rivals.

Right after its millennial Tay bot turned genocidal might not seem like the best time for Microsoft to pin its future on bots, conversations and artificial intelligence, but that's exactly what Satya Nadella announced at Build 2016 last night.

The Redmond CEO claimed that "we are on the cusp of a new frontier that pairs the power of natural human language with advanced machine intelligence".

Microsoft wants to bring conversation into so many places that it becomes the next stage of the GUI; "we want to take the power of human language and apply it more pervasively to all computing interfaces," Nadella said.

Conversations as a Platform, as Microsoft calls it, envisions a world where you ask Cortana to block out the week you'll be at a conference in your calendar and she tags in the bot from your favourite hotel to book a room for the right dates.

This bot, by the way, already knows what kind of room you prefer, and suggests a message to send to a friend who lives nearby letting them know when you'll be in town.

That extends the way Cortana can already index your email, looking for meetings you ought to go to and things you've promised to do to services like Skype and Slack, so she can extract information from video voicemail (which comes with a handy transcript using voice recognition since Microsoft is extracting the information for the bots, you can see it too).

If you're working late, Cortana might ask if you want to order a takeaway and pops up the Just Eat bot or the Dominos bot to take your order depending on what she knows about your eating habits.

Behind the scenes, the Dominos bot will be using Microsoft's Cognitive Services APIs to understand what you're saying or typing or talking about, although it's up to the developer whether they want to accept suggestions from the text recognition API that their bot should know that send a pizza to my crib' means deliver a pizza to my house'.

The intelligent underpinnings of conversational interfaces draw on AI and machine learning research Microsoft has been doing for a couple of decades. They also rely on on what they know about how businesses work, the information in your mail, and documents stored in the Microsoft Graph.

This is the big data processing that Azure is so good at and is more evidence of the cross-platform mobility of experience Nadella has been preaching from day one, because although Microsoft wants Windows to be the best place to have a voice conversation with Cortana, this will work in Cortana on your iPhone or Nexus too.

Intelligence is not just voice recognition for talking to bots and language understanding for typing messages. It's also image recognition (which down the line is going to include recognising people, places and things in video, along with emotions), and the other 20 APIs Microsoft is already offering.

It's also holograms and the way HoloLens maps the real world to mix virtual into reality. It's also the smart handwriting recognition any developer can put in their Windows apps - when you write tomorrow' and Cortana recognises it as a date, it's another way you could start a chat about what you want to do or automatically get a reminder when you need it.

Really, it's the Natural User Interfaces we've been promised for about a decade, and they might finally become real.

Plausible, polite conversations

If conversations with bots sound automated and dehumanising, like a future of brands shouting their wares at you, look at projects like Seeing AI, a service for smartphones and smartglasses to help the visually impaired understand who and what is around them.

The app can guide a blind person to take a photo of the menu (move the phone up and to the right') and then read it out to them and rather than listing that menu, it lets them pick and choose the sections they want to hear about.

Alternatively you can swipe a finger over the earpiece of your smartglasses to snap a photo and have it automatically captioned, so you know what's happening ( I think it's a girl throwing an orange frisbee in the park' says the system, using the kind of image captioning that was a research project only last year).

Cleverly, Microsoft demoed this capability by recognising the age and gender of the people you're talking to, instead of trying to do facial recognition on strangers walking down the street. That's a perfect of example of what Nadella calls "intelligence that augments human capabilities and experience", saying that "it's not going to be about man versus machines, it's going to be about man with machines".

Similarly, bots that talk to you or that Cortana deals with automatically for you - don't get to know your location unless you allow that. For example, Cortana might ask do you want the courier to know where you are this afternoon so the delivery comes to the right place?'.

Cortana can also securely pass along your credit card details, an innovation that might even work with something like the FIDO standards that underpin Windows Passport, so Cortana can do your banking for you, once you've used the Windows Hello biometrics to sign in.

AI is one of the biggest buzzwords around at the moment. It's also often hype. What Microsoft is promising is more achievable than some AI futures. Think of a bot as very simple app, or better yet a more useful search result that lets you do what you want rather than clicking on a link and hunting through a web page looking for the right tool.

That doesn't mean the idea of pervasive conversational interfaces isn't ambitious and it won't necessarily be easy to get right. It's not that the effects will be so much worse if it goes wrong than we have problems with other areas of technology; this is image recognition and language understanding, not robots with lasers and getting a hotel booking wrong is as easy on a website as it will be talking to a bot.

But because of the personal, intuitive, conversational interface, it might feel a lot more upsetting if a hotel bot gets our room wrong or a restaurant bot books the table for the anniversary of your first wedding when you're divorced and remarried.

That's one reason Nadella was careful to position AI, bots, assistants, conversational interfaces and intelligence as part of the future landscape of technology, but also something society needs to have a discussion about. He specifically mentioned the problems with Tay (while subtly noting that Microsoft's chat bots in China and Japan haven't run into the same malicious pranking by users), promising Microsoft would take "a principled approach" to adding intelligence to interfaces, and make technology that's "more inclusive and respectful" with those principles including privacy as well as security and compliance. "We want to build technology so we get the best of humanity, not the worst," he notes.

That makes conversational interfaces part of the ongoing discussion about accessibility and diversity in technology. Nadella hinted at other common questions like where the balance between security and privacy lie with things like encryption and whether technology is actually contributing to GDP.

Conversational interfaces that actually work could be great for productivity as well as extending access to computing to a lot more people than are comfortable with laptops and smartphones. That makes the old Microsoft promise of a computer on every desktop' seem almost unambitious.

The latest version of Nuance's speech recognition software, Dragon Professional Individual extends and enhances the program to make it still more flexible and convenient as an alternative to typing.

Designed for the busy professional a home worker, sole trader or anybody who doesn't require centralised administration of their speech recognition it's also geared to work with Nuance's new cloud-based product, Dragon Anywhere, when it launches early in 2016.

Dragon PI builds on the speech recognition engine of earlier versions, which was already extremely accurate, and concentrates on its automation and transcription abilities to improve productivity still further, from a wider range of devices.

Getting going

The key advantage to using Dragon for text dictation and control is the speed and accuracy it provides. Even if you're a competent touch typist, and many people aren't, you should notice at least a three-fold increase in creation speed when you dictate text, rather than typing it.

If you're an existing Dragon NaturallySpeaking user, upgrading to the new product is very straightforward. The software installs over the previous version and updates existing profiles to work with the new application. It also requests and then downloads and installs browser extensions, to enable it to be used with Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox.

The software works with a wired or Bluetooth headsets, as it always has, but now it also works with many microphones built into laptops and other devices, so you don't have to dress up' before using the software.

The program is controlled via the Dragon Bar, a small control panel which sits at the top of the screen by default, and zooms itself down to not much more than a button when you're using other applications. Conventional menus give access to tools, vocabulary and your speech profiles and there is also access to Dragon's copious help system. There's a command cheat sheet included in the online help, but it's a shame this isn't provided as a printed sheet, too.

You don't have to train the software and can use it straight out-of-the-box with a recognition accuracy of more than 99 per cent, or less than one word in a hundred will be incorrect. This review was dictated, and we only had six corrections to make. Spelling errors are a thing of the past and only homonyms, like to' for too' can occasionally cause a problem, though even these are rare.

If you are new to Dragon speech recognition, you will welcome the improved help via the simple command What can I say?' which calls up a quick menu showing the most frequently-used spoken commands. This menu is context-sensitive, so you're not drowned in long lists of all available commands.

Auto-text and custom commands

If you use phrases repeatedly, you can further increase your productivity by creating Auto-text boilerplates. Using the redesigned Dictation Box, quite intricately structured paragraphs can be entered and assigned an Auto-text name, which can then be used when dictating, to insert the standard text.

This technique can now be extended by the use of variables in the Auto-text name, so you can, for example, add a person's name to a salutation Auto-text, simply by saying it after calling the Auto-text.

In early 2016, Nuance will be launching Dragon Anywhere, a new speech recognition application which works from the cloud and can be used on iOS and Android devices. Dictation files can be moved between different versions of Dragon's software, while customisations, such as preferences and auto-texts, can be easily synced between the two products.

You could, for example, create a simple form and attach it to an Auto-text command, which would then insert it into any new document. As well as being available within Dragon PI, any new command will also be available immediately to any device using Dragon Anywhere, simply by setting the two applications to sync automatically.

Transcription

You don't have to dictate directly into your PC, as Dragon can transcribe from audio files created with a variety of different recorders. You may want to record notes while on a train, for example, and then have the software transcribe these into Word, RTF or text files when you get home or back to your office.

You can have several sources set up within the program, so the software adapts to the particular recording device you're transcribing from, such as a digital recorder, phone or tablet. With the last two, though, Dragon Anywhere may prove a more convenient choice.

As an extension to the program's transcription facilities, you can specify a watch folder', where any new audio files will automatically be transcribed; simply copying files there will create corresponding text files.

Controlling applications

Dragon is not restricted to taking dictation in Word. It can also be used for controlling other Office applications, like Excel and Outlook and works with the three main Internet browsers: Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox, using extensions which are available as free downloads.

Within a browser, the software can be used to control applications like Gmail and Wordpress and create and edit emails and blogs. Wherever you use Dragon, you can combine spoken commands and text creation with the standard keyboard and mouse use to get the most productive combination of control methods for your personal requirements.

Word processing and browser use are not isolated features, but work together in useful ways, such as when sending an email. Giving the command send e-mail' from within Word wraps up the current document as an attachment, opens Outlook and creates a new email, for you to simply add recipient and any covering text; much quicker than the conventional route.

This product continues Dragon's evolution as a productivity tool for anybody concerned about or inundated with text creation in their day-to-day work. A very high level of accuracy is taken as read and this latest iteration of the product concentrates on ease-of-use and facilities to automate regular tasks. A little time invested in customising the product to your own needs can produce benefits which you'll appreciate for much longer.

Buy Dragon Professional Individual (for PC) online now.

This article is brought to you in association with Nuance.

"I thought you were dead," Detective Del Spooner says to robot Sonny at one point during the 2004 film I, Robot. Sonny responds: "Technically I was never alive, but I appreciate your concern."

It's hard to imagine a robot that can talk in such an emotive way isn't somehow alive' even if such life is given only through technology. At the same time, though, it's also potentially very scary to think about what that means in any detail. For too long anyway.

Humans are meant to make demands of computers and said computers - in whatever form - comply. They shouldn't be capable of, or allowed, independent thought and action or else the balance of power is completely skewed. And it's got many of the world's brightest brains, including Professor Stephen Hawking, feeling more than a little concerned.

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," he told the BBC at the end of 2014.

"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

I, Robot depicts a world where AI-enhanced robots are there to protect humanity. But they are plotting a mutiny. Sonny is different. He doesn't toe the robotic line as expected of him and his peers. This robot is not like the others. He has dreams and feels emotion. But he's also pretty darn useful to and protective of Will Smith's Spooner character.

Surely such use isn't just limited to saving lives or being a good companion? The debate continues to gather momentum as us puny humans work out whether we are willing to risk a world where we might not be in charge versus a world where we are free from the shackles of a multitude of tasks raging from the boring and mundane to the complicated and time-consuming.

Fact or fiction

It's not just the movie world predicting bad things for humans if robotics and AI becomes evermore sentient.

Hawking is not alone in his thinking. Far from it. Back in the summer of 2015, Elon Musk CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, stressed his concerns about machines becoming too intelligent and, ultimately, taking over life as we know it.

"The AI researchers are all racing toward creating [super intelligence] without wondering what's going to happen if they succeed," he said during a panel discussion held at Google's Quad campus in Silicon Valley.

"I think AI risk is the biggest [existential] risk that I can see today by a fairly significant margin and it's happening fast - much faster than people realised."

To try and counter this, Musk is investing $10 million in AI projects around the world that are aimed at non-human threatening developments.

He added: "Here are all these leading AI researchers saying that AI safety is important. I agree with them, so I'm committing $10 million to support research aimed at keeping AI beneficial for humanity."

The line between smart and too clever

To ensure developments remain in human beings' interest rather than opposed to them, Musk is also ploughing 1 million into the creation of an AI research centre in partnership with Oxford and Cambridge Universities' Open Philanthropy Project.

"There are reasons to believe that unregulated and unconstrained development could incur significant dangers, both from 'bad actors' like irresponsible governments and from the unprecedented capability of the technology itself," said Oxford University's Nick Bostrom.

"The centre will focus explicitly on the long-term impacts of AI, the strategic implications of powerful AI systems as they come to exceed human capabilities in most domains of interest, and the policy responses that could best be used to mitigate the potential risks of this technology."

Musk has been vocal on the subject of AI for some time. He also voiced his concerns at an MIT symposium in 2014.

He said: "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence.

"I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish."

He added: "With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah, he's sure he can control the demon. Doesn't work out."

Does the good outweigh the bad?

There are pros and cons to just about everything in life. The internet has opened up new ways of communicating, working, learning and interacting for billions of people around the world. It's also opened up opportunities for the bad guys who want to steal from our online bank accounts, defraud us through fake inheritance or lottery scams or just troll.

But, we haven't switched the internet off. It offers us so much more than it takes away. Is there a chance the same could be said of AI?

Scary Hollywood what if' depictions and doomsayers aside, what if AI could be put to good use in the real-world in a business context?

The role of such digital assistants in many people's lives right now is to aid not obstruct. If you don't know the answer to something, need a reminder or alarm setting or can't use your hands to call someone, Siri can help you. The assistive nature of Cortana, Siri and the like, doesn't end there. That can only be seen as a positive thing for employees and employer alike, surely?

Apple's digital assistant remains at the stage where humans are still needed to help enhance Siri's knowledge base. But other technologies, IBM's Watson being an example, are able to do some of that learning and knowledge gathering themselves once taught the process.Is this just one step away from total independence?

AI and the mobile worker

Let's put aside the scaremongering for a moment. We live in an increasingly connected world The IoT means we'll be dealing with more devices talking to one another and consuming and transferring data than we can possibly handle. We need all the help we can get, surely?

We also need to remember we live in a cloud-focused and highly mobile world. Work is the thing you do, not the place you go to. As such, surely it would be highly advantageous to ensure that your work assistant is with you wherever you happen to be 24/7. We haven't yet perfected the art of teleportation so getting your co-workers or PA to the same place as you remains a pipe dream. But having a digital assistant on your wrist, phone, tablet or another form factor is surely the next best thing?

What if you're about to take a flight for business and you're somewhat scared of flying? You might want to check what the weather is like. The internet can provide some information here, but what if your digital assistant could deliver that insight to you alongside some calming tips and techniques to help you reduce your anxiety levels? It would certainly make you feel a lot less alone during an otherwise lonely situation, right?

There are plenty of other scenarios where having an intelligent digital assistant is far more beneficial than just typing or speaking into a computer. Help with pronunciation when travelling for business or during a business meeting with international contacts, is one example. Another would be helping you get through your work-related homework when you're in a hotel in the middle of nowhere and need to urgently prep for that important meeting, but your co-workers are in a different time zone and can't help unless you wake them up at 3am.

And that digital assistant isn't just assisting and helping you. We used to live in a world where people would default to search engines such as Google if they didn't know the answer to a question. Firing up Google on a laptop in the middle of a meeting can be a bit obtrusive though. You could just ask Google on a mobile device instead, but wouldn't it be much quicker to just ask the human-esque computer residing on that same form factor? Wouldn't that feel a little bit like you had another team member albeit a virtual one in the same room as you assisting with the meeting rather than being reliant on somewhat dumb technology?

But what if

Still, visionaries like Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak aren't sure about this increasing intelligence though.

"I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people. If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently," he said in an interview with The Australian Financial Review earlier in 2015.

"When I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines well I'm going to treat my own pet dog really nice."

But the UK government sees the potential more than the risks associated with AI, it would seem. It is investing 150 million to ensure the UK can keep pace with other leaders (such as Korea and the US) in the robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) industry an industry expected to be worth 70 billion by 2025.

Some feel it's not simply a case of replacing what humans do now. It's more about complementing existing processes and allowing machines to take on some of the grunt work to enable the supposedly, at least - more intelligent humans to work on higher value tasks elsewhere in organisations. The UK government's robotic plans, for example, involve sending robots in to clear up mines or nuclear plants.

"I'm less worried about the role of educators in universities, but I am worried about everyone else's jobs," Dan O'Hara, philosopher of technology and literary historian, said earlier in 2015 during a panel discussion debating the merits and issues associated with AI.

"The paradox is that the consensus of the research is that what we need to be investing in over the next couple of decades is in reskilling people in higher level cognitive abilities rather than replaceable, automatable skills."

There is a distinct difference between science fact and science fiction, according to many in the industry, including Microsoft's chief research officer Eric Horvitz.

"There have been concerns about the long-term prospect that we lose control of certain kinds of intelligences. I fundamentally don't think that's going to happen," he said when he was awarded the AAA Feigenbaum Prize in recognition of his contributions to the field of AI research.

"I think we will be very proactive in terms of how we field AI systems, and that in the end we'll be able to get incredible benefits from machine intelligence in all realms of life, from science to education to economics to daily life."

What's more, there's a finite capacity to what humans can take in and absorb. With technology you're dealing with very different boundaries of almost infinite proportions.

That's why the likes of Apple, Microsoft et al are embracing AI and machine learning to help digital assistants such as Cortana and Siri become ever-more intelligent and helpful.

Given the hype and heightened sense of fear around AI, are we in danger of becoming scared of our own shadows? People feared bank and credit cards when they first emerged, preferring instead to stick to cash. Such talk would be laughed at in a modern world of contactless payments and e-commerce.

We're also all used to telephone and internet banking and customer service helplines where we speak directly to a computer (via our phone keypads or keyboards) rather than to a human. We don't seem so fearful when we're considering the speed and ease of use then, do we? Surely the rise of the mobile concierge/digital assistant is only a few steps removed from this level of immediacy and convenience? Or perhaps, we're only OK with such convenience when we don't think it poses the risk that, by using such tools and technologies, we, as humans, might become the inconvenience?

There are a number of things to consider around the complex subject of AI and, in addition to those who fall into either the anti or pro camps, there are experts offering advice as to how to manage the situation.

Analyst firm Gartner is one such advisor. Back in March 2015, Frank Buytendijk, research vice president and analyst at Gartner, said: "Clearly, people must trust smart machines if they are to accept and use them.

"The ability to earn trust must be part of any plan to implement artificial intelligence (AI) or smart machines, and will be an important selling point when marketing this technology."

He added: "CIOs must be able to monitor smart machine technology for unintended consequences of public use and respond immediately, embracing unforeseen positive outcomes and countering undesirable ones."

Gartner has defined five levels to avoid things getting too out of control.

• Level 0 Non-ethical programming
• Level 1 Ethical oversight
• Level 2 Ethical programming
• Level 3 Evolutionary ethical programming
• Level 4 Machine-developed ethics

Level 2 is likely where we are currently with Cortana, Siri and other digital assistants.

"One smartphone-based virtual personal assistant would in the past guide you to the nearest bridge if you told it you'd like to jump off one. Now, it is programmed to pick up on such signals and refer you to a help line," Gartner stated in its report.

"This change underlines Gartner's recommendation to monitor technology for the unintended consequences of public use, and to respond accordingly."

There are two sides to every story and, ultimately, the rise of AI will not please everyone. Jobs will be lost as a result of this evolution (Forrester Research predicts such losses will be around the 16 per cent mark between now and 2025), but other areas will flourish as a result.

Indeed, Forrester predicts the rise of automation will fuel job growth elsewhere, including maintaining and repairing these intelligent machine.

"There's a lot of talk these days about the bleak future of employment: Claims that robots will steal all the jobs are commonplace in the media and in academia. These concerns are driven by a host of new technologies that automate physical tasks (robotics), intellectual tasks (cognitive computing), and customer service tasks (everything from self-help kiosks to grocery store scanners)," Forrester's JP Gownder says in the summary of his report on the subject.

"While these technologies are both real and important, and some jobs will disappear because of them, the future of jobs overall isn't nearly as gloomy as many prognosticators believe. In reality, automation will spur the growth of many new jobs including some entirely new job categories. But the largest effect will be job transformation: Humans will find themselves working side by side with robots. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders will be at the forefront of efforts to choose, pilot, implement, and evaluate these technologies and to make sure these technologies don't merely cut costs but drive customer value."

In short, there's not much to be afraid of just yet. The positive and assistive potential of AI and smart machines at present far outweigh the negatives.

However, as Gartner and others have advised, it is definitely something we need to continuously monitor and adapt our stance accordingly in order to ensure we continue to live in a world where technology and humans happily co-exist.

Apple has bought artificial intelligence startup Perceptio, which may allow Apple to introduce artificial intelligence systems on smartphones, without having to share as much user data with the source.

Earlier this week, Apple announced it had acquired UK speech processing AI company VocalIQ, which will reportedly be based at its new Cambridge R&D facility to help boost the powers of Siri.

Perceptio doesn't deal with speech like its previous acquisition, but its founders Nicolas Pinto and Zak Stone are known in the image recognition AI space, using machine deep learning.

The company wanted to create a system that would run image classification processes on devices using AI learning, without having to use the data on the device or from other places.

For example, it can analyse photos on a person's phone and recognise the people in the picture, just like Facebook and Google are able to do, but the process would happen on the device, without exposing any information to anyone else (such as the algorithm powering the whole process).

Bloomberg notes that the techniques fit alongside Apple's broader aims of using less customer data while allowing processing to happen on the smartphone or tablet itself.

It would seem this same philosophy applied to VocalIQ too - the company's CEO and co-founder said at the announcement: "For all of the many devices we use, we want to find a way to get what we need, in the easiest, safest way possible."

When asked about the value and more details of the acquisition, Apple said in a statement: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

Apple is busy hiring a glut of AI specialists in a bid to make Siri smarter than its rivals, according to Reuters.

At least 86 new staff will join the tech giant from PhD programmes or via numerous vacancy advertisements on job sites, the newswire reported today, as Apple tries to beat Google on smartphone AI functionality.

It wants to make its own voice assistant, Siri, better than Google Now for anticipating user needs and desires before they are expressed, and the specialists will all focus on developing better machine learning to achieve this.

However, experts told Reuters that Apple's privacy-centric philosophy would make it harder for the firm to succeed in its aim, because it would have less user data to base its machine learning predictions on.

This is in contrast to Google, which is able to analyse vast quantities of data generated by its huge swathe of Android users.

Joseph Gonzalez, co-founder of machine learning start-up Dato, said: "They want to make a phone that responds to you very quickly without knowledge of the rest of the world."

Microsoft introduced its own voice assistant, Cortana, in 2014, also based on machine learning, increasing competition for specialists to develop the technology, but Apple is understood to be fiercely hiring as much top talent as it can.

Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a professor at the University of Washington, told Reuters: "In the past, Apple has not been at the vanguard of machine learning and cutting edge artificial intelligence work, but that is rapidly changing.".

"They are after the best and the brightest, just like everybody else," he added.

Facebook's new virtual assistant for Messenger has been launched, dubbed 'M' after being previously codenamed 'Moneypenny'.

It was reported in July that Facebook was testing its own digital assistant, which would be an alternative to the likes of Apple's Siri, Google Now and Cortana.

At that time, it was rumoured that M would be a human-powered system that also incorporates artificial intelligence. It has now been confirmed by Wired that a team of "M trainers" will answer user questions, should the AI be unable to. As of now, it does not have access to Facebook's social data, but this could change with user consent, according to Facebook's VP of messaging products, David Marcus.

In time, the AI could become sophisticated enough to surpass the need for M's human element.

"We start capturing all of your intent for the things you want to do," Marcus said. "Intent often leads to buying something, or to a transaction, and that's an opportunity for us to [make money] over time."

This also invites comparisons to things such as Amazon's Echo hardware, which helps Amazon customers to look into and purchase products from its service. There is a question, however, of whether Facebook will make any money from this, or just use it as a way to collect more data from its users.

The company has come under fire in recent times for allegedly misusing users' data, with a lawsuit filed earlier in the year that claimed Facebook had been illegally tracking customer data.

The social network's policy in this area was dubbed a "Wild West" approach to data protection by campaigner Max Schrems, but his case was rejected by a Vienna court at the start of July, the court claiming it lacked the jurisdiction to examine the case.

Facebook Messenger currently offers person-to-person money transfers to US customers, something also available through other social media firms like Snapchat and Google's Gmail.

A separate Messenger website was recently launched to distance the IM service from the main Facebook site, after mobile users were forced to download a separate application for Messenger the previous year.

M is currently available only to residents in the California Bay Area, USA, but will eventually roll out to all Messenger users.

Apple is apparently developing a voicemail transcription service that will answer phone calls and convert messages into text.

These messages will then be uploaded to iCloud and sent to users via email (or presumably iMessage) for you to read when they're free, instead of having to listen a message and try and decipher what the person on the other end of the line is saying.

Apparently, the system can also tell people why a user is unavailable (such as being in a meeting, or on holiday or will be away for a certain period of time) so the caller can tailor their message accordingly.

The news comes via Business Insider, which reported the service could launch in winter 2016.

The report claimed many people, including those of younger generations, prefer using text rather than voice and so this feature would appeal to them specifically.

It added a number of Apple employees are already testing what it calls iCloud Voicemail and it will be released inside iOS 10 rather than the upcoming iOS 9 that will be released later this year.

However, don't be disheartened that it's not coming this year - Apple has already announced Siri will be upgraded when iOS 9 launches, including adding the ability to search within third-party applications and guess what you're going to do next, even further reducing the amount of time it takes you to do anything on an iPhone, iPad or iPod.

Microsoft is reportedly working on an advanced iteration of its personal assistant software, Cortana, rolling it out to both Apple and Android devices as a standalone app.

The updated software will use research from AI project, Einstein', Reuters reports, to launch an advanced version to be included on Windows 10 when it is released later this year.

Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research who also took part in the Einstein project, told interviewers at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington: "This kind of technology, which can read and understand email, will play a central role in the next roll out of Cortana, which we are working on now for the fall time frame."

The potential availability of Cortana on Apple and Android devices ties into Microsoft's new strategy to concentrate on software that can be used across platforms.

At the Windows 10 launch event last month, it was revealed that Microsoft's Cortana would be integrated into the Office app for Windows Phone. This would appear as a new "Work Assistant", a tool that accepts voice commands.

Previous to this announcement, Bill Gates mentioned the company was working on a "Personal Agent" for Windows, saying: "One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to.

"The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not [an] efficient model the agent will help solve this. It will work across all your devices."

Facebook is buying a natural language recognition startup as it tries to muscle in on the territory of personal assistant tools like Siri and Cortana.

The social network hopes to improve its offering with the services of Wit.ai, an open platform that allows developers to build apps that people can talk to.

The startup, founded in 2013, claims to have 6,000 developers using its technology to power hundreds of apps and devices.

In a blog post on its site, Wit.ai's team wrote: "It is an incredible acceleration in the execution of our vision. Facebook has the resources and talent to help us take the next step.

"Facebook's mission is to connect everyone and build amazing experiences for the over 1.3 billion people on the platform technology that understands natural language is a big part of that, and we think we can help."

Wait.ai's tool can take audio of the user's requests recorded by the app and turn it into structured data, telling the app to perform whatever task was requested by the user.

While the value of the deal has not been revealed, it gives Facebook a chance to catch up to rivals like Google's Google Now, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, all of which are popular voice assistants.

Microsoft is also making other moves in speech and machine learning, with the Preview release of Skype Translator, which is currently able to translate conversations held between English and Spanish speakers in near real-time.

Wit.ai stated it will continue to work with developers, with the technology remaining open and becoming completely free to use.

UK users of the Windows Phone 8.1 developer preview are set to get access to the beta version of Microsoft's personal voice assistant Cortana within the next fortnight.

The timeline for UK delivery has been confirmed by Marcus Ash, group programme manager for Cortana, who said the beta software will be provided as an update in "less than two weeks."

He also revealed the UK version of the software will sport an English accent

The finished version of the software is pencilled in for Q4 2014.

The tool will not be available for iOS and Android, despite suggestions to the contrary, Ash confirmed back in June. At the time, he said Microsoft is only "actively talking about" launching Cortana on other platforms.

This would put it in direct competition with Apple's Siri and Google Now.

The company are focusing on the successful launch of the product on Windows Phone, but Cortana may reach Windows 8 at a later date. Microsoft's plan is to establish the platform on their own devices, prioritising existing customers before rolling it out to iOS and Android.

These comments from Ash, many of them made via Twitter, have put rumours of Cortana reaching iOS and Android devices to bed after days of speculation. It has also been confirmed that Cortana will reach Windows Phone within weeks, rather than months, as had been previously expected.

This story was originally published on 16 June, before being updated on 22 July to reflect new UK preview release date information.

BlackBerry has announced details about the voice assistant feature it's planning to introduce through the release of its BlackBerry 10.3 operating system.

The next version of the BlackBerry OS is due to make its debut on the firm's innovativePassport device, and will feature a reworked user interface, messaging capabilities and productivity features.

Users of the software can operate the BlackBerry Assistant using voice or typed commands, and it's designed to adapt the way it responds to people the more they use it.

In a blog post, announcing its arrival, the company said the assistant will be able to help users out with a range of tasks from searching through emails, to managing social networks and sending out invites to people.

"The more I speak with it, the more tuned-in to my queries it gets," wrote Donny Halliwell, the editor of the firm's Inside BlackBerry blog.

He also used the post to take a swipe at the firm's rivals, Microsoft and Apple, who have both rolled out voice assistants for users of their respective mobile operating systems.

"If you've had experience with other smartphone-based personal assistants, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how accurate BlackBerry Assistant is at recognising your requests."

Through the use of Bluetooth connectivity, users can also sync the device to their cars so they can carry out tasks on their smartphone without taking their eyes off the road, added Halliwell.

One of the standout features of the software, he claims, is that it carries out its tasks without leaving the Assistant app, and there are also a number of Easter Eggs built into it for people to uncover as they use it.

"We briefly lost power [at our house] and I needed to find my way around the house in the dark. I asked the BlackBerry Assistant to Turn on the flashlight'," he explained.

"The flashlight app turned on and the screen, within the app, a switch to turn it off appeared."

The "OK Google" voice search command, available to users of Chrome OS, is now being ported to the search giant's internet browser.

Once enabled, users will be able to open a new window or tab, or visit Google's homepage, and conduct a voice search. Saying "Ok Google" will activate the feature, and the software will then listen to what is said afterwards and treat it as a search query.

Chrome and Google have offered voice search for some time, but before this would require the clicking of a microphone icon next to or near the search bar. With the new update, no user input is required to activate the voice search other than the phrase "Ok Google".

Those opting for the latest Chrome distribution will get the feature immediately, compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux. The command is also available in the latest version of Chrome OS.

The command word only works in English for now. Google has not specified when it might expand the feature to include other languages and regions.

Other updates that came along with the voice commands included bug fixes and improved stability.

For Chrome OS users, support for folders has been added to the launcher, enabling them to organise their apps on a main screen rather than having to search through multiple slides.

Also bundled in the new version for Chrome OS is captive portal detection, which will allow users to easily gain access to public Wi-Fi networks in places like cafes, hotels and airports.

Apple has reportedly splashed the cash on UK-based speech recognition company Novauris, as part of its ongoing work to improve the responsiveness of its voice assistant Siri.

The company has been going since 2002, and specialises in technology, dubbed NovaSearch, that uses voice commands to help people sift through large databases for information.

"It does this by coupling novel, advanced speech recognition with proprietary, fast search techniques," the Novauris website states.

"NovaSearch provides core technology for applications over telephone and data networks and in embedded devices.

"By providing convenient voice input together with modest computation and memory requirements, NovaSearch enables voice-access applications on a wide range of platforms," the website adds.

At the time of writing, Apple was remaining tight-lipped about the acquisition, which was brought to light by a report on TechCrunch late last week.

Apple issued the publication with a short statement that said: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss purpose or plans."

The deal is thought to have been struck during the second half of 2013.

The Novauris listing on Companies House gives an address for the firm that previously housed Apple's UK retail operations. The listing suggests Novauris moved into the premises around October time last year.

While Apple's plans for the technology remain sketchy, it's highly likely the Novauris technology will be used to bolster the capabilities of its voice assistant Siri.

The tool made its debut on the iPhone 4S in 2011, and has blazed a trail for similar technologies on mobile devices. For instance, arch-rival Microsoft debuted its Siri challenger Cortana last week.

A video purporting to show details of Microsoft's rumoured Siri rival Cortana has leaked onto the internet, just one day after photos and screenshots showing its user interface emerged.

The video, from Yash Maheshwari, editor of UnleashThePhones, appears to show the initial setup process for Cortana on Windows Phone 8.1.

Cortana, which is apparently named after the artificial intelligence featured in the Microsoft Halo series of games, first introduces herself, claiming she "can help make life a bit easier for you".

The user is then asked to sign in with a Microsoft Account, with Cortana explaining she cannot do anything for them until they do.

They are then asked to enter a name for themselves, and then choose their interests and opinions from a set of multiple choice menus. Once this process is finished, she will make suggestions based on those answers in addition to location data.

What is distinctly missing from the video, which does include sound, is Cortana's voice.

While there is yet to be any leak of this, it is widely speculated Jen Taylor, the voice actor for Cortana in the Halo series, will reprise the role.

Images of the Windows 8.1 interface first emerged in June 2013, when a Reddit user got their hands on a phone lost by a Microsoft employee. While an app called zCortana was listed, it was not until September that any details of the service really started to emerge.

It is expected the technology will be officially revealed at Microsoft's Build conference, which will take place from 2-4 April 2014 in San Francisco.