As for &quot;spectacularly well&quot; -- well, the person behind the curtain wiggling the levers retains a lot of influence. Garbage in, garbage out, remember?<p>I&#x27;m reminded of the time Google Translate autodetected &quot;Gesundheit&quot; as Spanish. And Gmail kindly offering to translate &quot;hahaha&quot; from Portuguese, putting an ad for coconuts next to it.<p>Data science is improving, but you might be surprised how slowly. Especially in the consumer space, because the metrics on effectiveness are so warped.<p>Voice recognition of numbers only, over a phone connection, can be below 40% accuracy! Much of the perceived success of these systems comes not from the core machine algorithm, but from clever human tweaks around it. Also end-users who are happy with what they get, not quite realizing how goofy it all is if they were to get a glimpse of the raw data.