I'll give it a shot:

> Buzz Lightyear walks into a bar called the "Uncanny Valley" and asks the bartender for a vodka soda. The bartender gives him a vasectomy. Voice recognition is important!

"Siri's voice recognition is kind of bad some of the time. I've extrapolated this observation to all other voice recognition systems"

I have been extremely impressed by Google's voice recognition. It got things right that I never thought it would, such as homophones or proper names.

I don't mean to belittle you or Google's speech team, but neither homophones nor proper names are considered hard problems in modern automatic speech recognition.

I don't remember the case exactly, but it was something that was hard to resolve, at least it seemed so to me.

"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?)

Robots don't have a sense of humor.

And the article is about how voice recognition is just in its infancy.