Quote: "Bringing this back to 2017, I've suggested elsewhere that voice interfaces do not have a roadmap to become universal computer interfaces or platforms. Machine learning now means that speech recognition can accurately transcribe the sound of someone speaking into text and that natural language processing can turn that text into a structured query - that's one breakthrough. But you still need somewhere to send the query, and it is not clear that we have any roadmap to a system that can give a structured answer to any query that any person can pose, rather than just dumping you out to a keyword search of the web. To even start making voice interfaces useful for general purpose computing rather than for niches, I would suggest that we would need general AI, which is (at best) a few decades away."

An interesting way to distinguish the potential between new technologies. I would say that someone might argue that a fully autonomous car would also require general AI for example. If we would argue that "no, it should just have less casualties than human drivers", we can continue with arguing that a voice interface will be abundant by just having fewer mistakes than by typing words or having queries better answered than by a text interface. On the roadmap will then probably be more sensors than microphones alone and it's hard to dismiss such a technological progression only because at some time we might need general AI to continue the technological progress.