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Conversational computing
by Theodore Kinni
Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and
Think, by James Vlahos, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019
S
teve Jobs could be relentless when he wanted something. In early 2010, he
wanted a small startup in San Jose, Calif. Chief executive Dag Kittlaus
and his cofounders had just raised a second round of funding and didn’t
want to sell. Jobs called Kittlaus for 37 days straight, until he wrangled
and wheedled a deal to buy the two-year-old venture for Apple at a price report-
edly between US$150 million and $200 million. The company was Siri Inc.
Wired contributor James Vlahos tells the story of how Siri took up perma-
nent residence in the iPhone in his new book, Ta l k t o Me. It’s the first nontechni-
cal book on voice computing that I’ve seen and a must-read if you have any inter-
est in the topic.
Vlahos spends the first third of Ta l k t o Me describing the platform war cur-
rently raging in voice computing. He details the race among the big players, in-
cluding Amazon, Google, and Apple, to embed AI-driven voices in as many
different devices as possible, as they seek to dominate the emerging ecosystem.
The fact that Amazon now has more than 10,000 employees working on Alexa
provides a good sense of the dimensions of that race.
But voice computing is more than a platform play. It is likely to have ramifi-
cations and applications for every company, especially if Vlahos’s contention that
“the advent of voice computing is a watershed moment in human history” turns
out to be right.
“Voice is becoming the universal remote to reality, a means to control any
and every piece of technology,” he writes. “Voice allows us to command an army
of digital helpers — administrative assistants, concierges, housekeepers, butlers,
advisors, babysitters, librarians, and entertainers.” Voice will disrupt the business
models of powerful companies — and create new opportunities for upstarts — in
part because it will put AI directly in the control of consumers, Vlahos argues.
“And voice introduces the world to relationships long prophesied by science fic-