>I'd say the Alexa is more like birth of the personal computer. There were advancements in Text-To-Speech and/or speech recognition, stretching back to the ear

>I'd say the Alexa is more like birth of the personal computer. There were advancements in Text-To-Speech and/or speech recognition, stretching back to the early days of PC/Mac e.g. DragonDictate[1] using Hidden Markov Models, IBM ViaVoice[2], latterly Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking[3]. Although, they were not perfect in their early iterations. However, they got progressively better and fairly impressive once trained properly. I would rather draw comparisons with their current day counterparts like Amazon Polly or Lyrebird[4] et al., than associate voice assistants with a paradigm shift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition#1970-1990 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition#1970-1990 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonDictate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonDictate [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ViaVoice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ViaVoice [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking [4]https://lyrebird.ai/ https://lyrebird.ai/