Thursday, November 23, 2017

Holiday gift ideas: Virtual assistants transform from novelty to necessity

5:28 AM    
If you asked me what I consider to be

this year's breakthrough product, I'd go with the rise of virtual assistants.
Apple really started things off with Siri, which has expanded from living in the iPhone and iPad to every Macintosh and soon to Apple's HomePod speaker, which has been announced but not yet released.
Amazon's Echo introduced us to Alexa, and Google followed along.
Some of us who are fans of science fiction have been waiting for these virtual assistants to catch up to the likes of "computer" from Star Trek and perhaps even "HAL 9000" from 2001: A Space Odyssey.