Amazon's Echo is a standalone voice assistant you can boss around

Got to hand it to Amazon, eh? Days after announcing same-day delivery service for Prime members in Vanvouver and Toronto, they now  revealed a standalone personal assistant.

Echo looks like a speaker but is actually a connected voice assistant like Apple's Siri, Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana. As shown by the cringeworthy ad above, it is triggered by the 'Alexa' word and can be engaged in a number of ways.

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Microsoft throws down gauntlet on personal assistants by pitting Cortana against Siri

While Apple put the mobile personal assistant in the mainstream four years ago with Siri, the competition is now gunning for the top spot. Microsoft, whose Cortana personal assistant is powered by Bing, ships with Windows Phone 8.1 and apparently has a wider breadth of contextual search features.

Microsoft's resorting to 'comparison' ads by showcasing features available to Cortana that Siri doesn't have or can't do. What's weird is that we have an entry level Lumia being pitted against a more expensive iPhone 5s. Should be interesting to see where all this is headed once iOS 8 is released and Siri's new functions are finally revealed.

Job listings show Apple plans to add more language support for Siri

Apple has said at WWDC that iOS users can expect to get new dictation languages for Siri. And we would seem to be getting more with new job listings posted by the company. This could mean they might add Thai, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian into the mix. It has been previously reported that Apple was also working on adding Arabic, Dutch, Finnish, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian. It’s a good thing that Apple is helping bring Siri to more and more markets.

Source: Ubergizmo

Microsoft's Cortana assistant screens leak

She's not only inspired by the voluptous AI from Halo, Cortana is Microsoft's take on the personal mobile assistant and their answer to Siri and Google Now. The Verge showed off some screens from the upcoming feature which will be omniscient and tightly integrated to the Windows Phone UX. Cortana is expected to be a learning assistant, it will note user patterns, pull contextual data as well as location-based information. Cortana is expected to be unvelied to developers in the upcoming Microsoft Build conference.

Source: The Verge