Or, it could also be that natural language interfaces aren&#x27;t going to become much better than they are. Siri and cortana have been around for a few years now, but they haven&#x27;t actually gotten all that much smarter. We&#x27;ve got the most powerful companies in the world investing the resources of thousands of the smartest programmers to build these agents, and the best they can do is siri? That doesn&#x27;t bode well for the intelligent agent future.<p>The primary bottleneck for intelligent agents is not voice recognition, it&#x27;s semantic insight. They need to have an innate ability to learn the meaning of new things without being programmed to do so. As far as I know siri, cortana and google do not do this. Meaning must be programmed into them explicitly. That doesn&#x27;t scale. Yes, they can learn new things, but they learn them slowly. You can even build advanced intelligent things like self-driving cars (with great effort) because the required level of understanding about the world is very constrained. However, you cannot scale it up to general purpose assistants because the amount of code required cannot be built in any reasonable amount of time. Until we have algorithms that create algorithms, software rewriting itself and evolving based on higher goals, we won&#x27;t see the promised star-trek-level personal assistants come to fruition.<p>It could go either way. Let us hope you are right.