This is very true. At the same time though, through the commidification of computing resources, as well as tooling continuing to advance, open source alternatives are reaching parity.<p>Humor me. When Gmail first came out, it was revolutionary. Now, you could host your own clone for $10-20&#x2F;month using containerized Elastic Search indexing all of your email, with a small virtual machine ingesting your email from the internet, and providing it to you over JSON to your local mail client or through a web interface.<p>Voice recognition could follow the same trajectory. Computing power will increase, storage costs will continue to plummet (I&#x27;ve mentioned this multiple times on HN, but Samsung is predicting 128TB SSD drives in 3 years).<p>You don&#x27;t need patents anymore, as you mentioned, because you can provide the service, not the underlying source code. But you still need to monetize quickly (if that&#x27;s your goal), because the rising tide of technology can quickly supplant your lead with other competitors or open source options.