"But if we can ever jump past this uncanny valley, that’s where we’ll basically build AI." To me this seemed like the main conclusion of the post. And I agree

"But if we can ever jump past this uncanny valley, that’s where we’ll basically build AI." To me this seemed like the main conclusion of the post. And I agree. Voice recognition seems like an AI-complete problem. I think conversations will always be awkward and frustrating until Siri can construct a mental model of my habits, my particular turns of phrases and accent, what I'm up to right now, what I think is important, who else is in the room, etc. etc. I don't think you can (only) throw deep learning at the problem and expect anything but superficial responses. (Maybe if you had one neural net per user?)