There are two parts to this. First one is about parsing the speech, and we're getting pretty good at that. The second part is actually understanding the context

There are two parts to this. First one is about parsing the speech, and we're getting pretty good at that. The second part is actually understanding the context of the speech and that's obviously harder problem. We're just starting to explore machine learning in any meaningful sense. I think the progress we've seen already bodes tremendously well for AI assistants. >The primary bottleneck for intelligent agents is not voice recognition, it's semantic insight. I absolutely agree. We won't see general purpose assistants in the near future, but that doesn't mean we won't see specialized assistants. Something like the desktop is a fairly constrained environment. A lot of what you'd need to do is already being done by systems like Google search. You can type in a random term and it will often do an excellent job of finding exactly what you wanted. Here's an example of just how good this tech is now. I forgot a name of a tv show one time and I typed in "movie with a clock and the key" into Google. Sure enough it found the show as the first result. While we don't know how to make a general purpose AI right now, but there is a ton of work happening in that domain. I would be very surprised if we don't see a lot of progress there in the next few decades. The AI doesn't have to be self improving, our brains aren't and we can do all the things that a digital assistant would need to do.