This is a really well put explanation of why the natural language processing side is hard, but it assumes that we can even get letters and words into the system

This is a really well put explanation of why the natural language processing side is hard, but it assumes that we can even get letters and words into the system. I'm a linguist who works on speech perception, and I'm increasingly convinced that true speech-to-text, that can stand in for a human transcriptionist, is an AI-complete problem. We can get close, but you'll always need context and understanding of the world to accurately get things like "I'm going to take a walk in the park, then I'm going to take a wok from the Chinese Restaurant". Siri and whatnot are amazing, and there's room for improvement, especially on the NLP end, but these issues combined with how damned hard speech is mean that Jarvis will be a keyboard away for years to come.