This time I know it: Siri!

That's just the starting point: in the past days at the CES 2016 in Las Vegas IBM has shown its Watson cognitive computing system applied to Pepper robot. A machine learning solution embedded in a robotic and emphatic assistant.

Is this the way we're going to meet AIs in our daily life?

Maybe in the future, but 2015 was when the messaging revolution happened. Facebook acquired Wit, in order to releases its new product M: a personal assistant embedded in Messenger. You ask for something, M answers with the help of human curation, in order to let it improve in its capabilities. They are introducing new services and 2016 "is going to be a big year for Messenger".

2015 has been as well the year when AI players went Open Source: Google release its TensorFlow engine and Open AI came to life.

This is where machine learning is going: personal assistants. Smart, task-oriented and most of all, human-like, even if only in remote mode.

Show me.

Clara schedules your meetings, Taylor assists you during your travels around the world, Mona is your new personal shopper, Riley helps you to look for a new house while Peter is in charge of your legal affairs. Do you know Slack? In the meanwhile of your daily work routine you can add bots like Nestor and ask for its help as a normal colleague or build your own bot with Botkit.

Let me understand: is text going to be the *next* interface?

Who needs an interface, anyway? It's just a matter of giving the right answer to your questions and thanks to image recognition AIs are able to learn live what's around them: see Cloud Vision API by Google in action.

Where's my frightening future with droids and robots?

Do you mean something like Persona Synthetics? Don't be afraid, for now it's just a marketing initiative to promote the unmissable Humans series. Have a look.

I see a connection between pop culture and tech news…

So follow the pop2tech by Reply U on Medium and stay tuned for the next R20.