If talking out loud to Alexa (or your digital assistant of choice) feels unnatural, you're not alone. I've had Siri for as long as she's been alive, yet I can count on one hand the number of times I've spoken to her. It's always seemed easier to open an app on my iPhone or type in a Google query and get exactly what I'm looking for, rather than navigating a line of verbal questioning that eventually leads to my desired answer — or not.

Artificial intelligence isn't just for scary algorithms poised to take over our lives — it can also be a fun thing to play with, as we learned when we trained a computer to generate Lifehacker headlines. But you can't play until you have some good data sets to start with.

You probably use machine-learning systems every day without even knowing it. The technology gives us spam filters, our Facebook News Feeds, digital assistants, search engines, Netflix picks, Amazon recommendations, fraud detection systems, chatbots and more. And it's only going to become more pervasive. For forward-looking parents, it's time to get your kids on it.

Last month, Google rolled out its innovative Google Lens app to most Android phones. Here's how to get the most out of its visual-recognition abilities.

Google's AlphaGo AI smashing humanity's best? Amazing stuff. Unfortunately, if you wanted to learn how the AI managed to play so well, the only option was to wade through research papers that are, frankly, not the easiest things to get through. What you need is an expert to break everything down, which is exactly what AI and autonomous robots engineer Aman Agarwal did yesterday.

The only thing worse than going to meetings is scheduling them. You have to check with everyone's availability, find a time and location that works, send out an invitation, and then bug people until they RSVP. It actually takes about 17 minutes to schedule a single meeting, according to x.ai, a company focused on solving the issue with artificial intelligence.

An AI named Angelina is making games thanks to researchers from the University of Falmouth. With the press of a button, Angelina writes the rules of the game, finds assets and ideas from the internet and then creates a file that works with a stand-alone application.

Let's face it: not all of us are cut out to be the next Pulitzer-winning writer, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't write perfectly comprehensible text. Thanks to WhiteSmoke Web, you can keep embarrassing typos, grammatical errors, and stylistic flops out of your work — and subscriptions are on sale for almost 75 percent off.

Brief items of note for Lifehacker readers, including: meet Dell and CSIRO's new AI supercomputer, 18 vagina facts everyone should know, what would happen to you if you walked on the sun?

If someone showed you a group photo containing your boyfriend or girlfriend, you could probably spot them without much trouble. But what if the photo was from ten years ago? Or what if their face was partially obscured? What if it contained thousands of people? That's when you might need artificial intelligence to help you out.

Chinese tech firm Yitu has perfected its facial recognition AI to such a degree that it can now identify faces faster than humans - even when they are intimately familiar with the face in question. Welcome to the next creepy stage of video surveillance.

You've probably seen the Watson commercials, where what looks like a sentient box interacts with celebrities like Bob Dylan, Carrie Fisher, and Serena Williams; or doctors; or a young cancer survivor. Maybe you caught the IBM artificial intelligence technology's appearance in H&R Block's Super Bowl commercial starring Jon Hamm. "It is one of the most powerful tools our species has created. It helps doctors fight disease," Hamm says. "It can predict global weather patterns. It improves education for children everywhere. And now we unleash it on your taxes."

Over the last 15 years, Australians have reduced the amount of time spent on physical and routine tasks at work by two hours each week thanks to automation. Retail workers have spent less time ringing up items and more time helping customers, bank employees less time counting banknotes and more time giving financial advice.

And if Australia plays its cards right, we could be making $2.2 trillion from automation by 2030, according to research commissioned by Google.

Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers, including: the truth behind Facebook's "Skynet" AI, Rick And Morty episode 2 recap, Bitcoin reaches near-record highs.

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating our daily lives, with applications that curate your phone pics, manage your email, and translate text from any language into another. Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are all heavily researching how to integrate AI into their major services. Soon you'll likely interact with an AI (or its output) every time you pick up your phone. Should you trust it? Not always.

Zo is the spiritual successor to Microsoft Tay - the artificially intelligent chatbot that famously went into a racist, sexist meltdown in 2016. Zo was built with more sophisticated AI software than its predecessor, which translates to more fluid conversations and less maniacal hate speech. However, it turns out Zo really didn't care for the Life Is Strange video game series - and she doesn't care who knows it.

Android: If your phone's storage is running low, you might want to start deleting some low-quality photos from your phone or backing it up with an app like Google Photos. Luckily the photo app EyeEm announced an update on Wednesday that uses artificial intelligence to pick out your best photos.

Computers believe in conspiracy theories now. The New Inquiry's Francis Tseng trained a bot to recognise patterns in photos and draw links between similar pictures, forming the kind of conspiracy-theory diagram seen in the last act of a Homeland episode or the front page of Reddit. It's a cute trick that reminds us that humans are gullible (hey, maybe those photos do match!), and that the machines we train to think for us could end up just as gullible.

Looking through my RSS feeds, the media releases I receive in my email, and the headlines in the tech press and on social media, there’s one thing that seems to be dominating much of the conversation - artificial intelligence. Some of the applications seem quite interesting, such as the TranslateOne2One. There are others that solve smaller, yet annoying issues, such as the announcement by Slack this morning. But what are the problems we want AI to solve?

Wondering how humanity's last champion of Go, one of the most complex games of strategy ever devised by our species, fared against's Google all-conquering AI overlord, AlphaGo? The above picture says it all, really.