Speech recognition has been around a lot longer than Siri, but Apple's dulcet-toned digital assistant helped bring the technology to a mass audience, and inspire futuristic visions like the one voiced by Scarlett Johansson in "Her." Adam Cheyer, one of the co-founders of Siri (acquired by Apple in 2010), says speech recognition is poised to become more widely used and more sophisticated. We spoke with him at a recent Techonomy dinner in San Francisco. Improvements to speech recognition have happened "at a fairly linear rate" over the past 40 years, he said, but massive data collection is about to yield "the largest leap in progress … that the field has ever seen." While Cheyer acknowledges that speech recognition is "just one tool in how people interact with computers," he believes that seamlessly combining touch and voice interfaces will lead to new applications in fields like education and profoundly impact people's lives.

In yet another example of Satya Nadella's prudent strategy to bring Windows services to other platforms, has confirmed it's getting ready to make its digital assistant Cortana available on iOS and Android in the coming months, though it comes with a caveat. The company will be releasing a companion app in late June for Android that gives access to content from a required Windows 10 PC, Microsoft said in a blog post Tuesday. The app gives those non-Windows Phone users access to content from the PC like their OneDrive pictures, and as a bonus it also includes mobile access to Microsoft's desktop app for its virtual digital assistant, Cortana. While the requirement to have a Windows 10 PC seems like a big catch, Microsoft is still proving to be a more open distributor of its services than and, whose digital assistants Siri and Google Now only work on Android phones and iPhones. In other examples of Nadella's more open strategy, Microsoft last year brought its Office Suite to the iPad, while its first wearable device, the Microsoft Band, works with Windows, Android and iOS devices.

For anyone that wants Siri to do more than set iCal appointments and dictate messages, there may be hope beyond a hack. is reportedly working on allowing third-party services to integrate with Siri so that the iPhone's digital assistant can carry out tasks -- book flights or send texts on other messaging apps -- which go beyond the services Apple can provide. Currently Siri syncs to other services with whom Apple has made business arrangements, such as Wolfram Alpha or Open table, but future integrations wouldn't require painstaking deals according to the report from tech news service The Information. Apple needs to step up Siri's abilities in the face of mounting competition from Now and a Siri-like digital assistant that is reportedly bringing to Windows Phone in early April, called Cortana. Even voice recognition firm Nuance, whose technology powers Siri, is augmenting its own digital assistant Wintermute with the ability to search a multitude of third-party apps, according to one source close to the project. It's clear that iPhone users want digital assistants like Siri to work with other services.

Academia is supposed to be a place where creative types can be free, and with that freedom accomplish great things, whether it be new art, breakthrough treatises, scientific discoveries, or feats of engineering. But academia isn't what it used to be, and to provide some insights into some of its problems, I compared notes with friend and former colleague, Nick Cassimatis, who is associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer. In our own ways, he and I have found severe limitations in academia today, limitations that led to my leaving academia to co-found a research institute, 2AI to be funded by intellectual property, and that led Nick to start his own company outside academia, SkyPhrase in order to achieve his ambitions in artificial intelligence. Nick's romantic ambitions started early – he began research into artificial intelligence and natural language at the precocious age of fifteen, and wrote a French-to-English translation program that helped put him on the Top-20 High School Students List by USA Today. More than simply artificial intelligence, his aim is to understand human-level intelligence, and how it can come about via many unintelligent parts.

Lars Hard's ExpertMaker seeks to put artificial intelligence in the hands of developers. Entrepreneur Lars Hard feels he has seen the future of search, information gathering and the web in general, and it is artificial intelligence. Computational intelligence, to put it more succinctly: the ability to gather information or find your destination on the web faster and more efficiently with an artificial search partner that can predict what you want. The number of search engines, the myriad pathways from a user's inquisitive mind to the answer he or she seeks requires that someone, or some thing, must learn the complexities of people's search patterns in order to better serve the searcher. "Everything on the internet will have to get more intelligent," said Hard. "Siri is a very good example of what we're going to see more of in the future," said Hard, who has set up his own company, ExpertMaker, to develop software for artificial intelligence.

Apple's famous artificial intelligence agent is eating humble pie today. Ask Siri "Who is smarter, Siri or Google Now?" and Siri obligingly links to an article about a recent 3,086-question challenge that ranked Google Now as the top scorer. Unfortunately for Siri, the quiz had some built-in biases. Designed by the Stone Temple digital marketing group, the purpose of the exercise was to explore a giant, new knowledge base that Google was rumored to be building. Google's mysterious "Knowledge Vault," which was reported by the New Scientist in August, caused a tumult in the SEO community, which lives or dies by its ability to understand how Google prioritizes responses to search queries.

Vlad Sejnoha is chief technology officer for Nuance Communications. For many people, 2012 was the year when it became "normal" to use your voice to control your phone, car, computer and even your TV. This happened thanks to some remarkable advances in the field of voice recognition and natural language understanding (NLU). Capabilities that not so long ago were considered science fiction have become essential attributes of mainstream mobile devices and consumer electronics. People have taken to these new voice-powered user interfaces with great enthusiasm, many reporting a strong emotional connection with their new "assistant."

We all know how frustrating the experience of calling into a customer service department can be. Long hold times, the endless repetition of birth dates, previous addresses, maiden names... It's enough to make you want to avoid the whole process altogether. But the cloud--paired with technologies like speech recognition, biometrics, natural language, artificial intelligence and machine learning--is giving rise to intelligent virtual agents that are providing faster, more personalized service. Automated customer service solutions have been around for a while, but the cloud is drastically improving the model. Intelligent virtual agents can now crunch data about who you are and what you need, providing the kind of efficient feedback loop required to autonomously keep getting smarter.

Nao, from young French firm Aldebaran Robotics, is one of the better known small humanoid education and research robots--but he's about to be replaced: By Nao Next Gen. The new robot is an evolution of the existing design, but it may also be a revolution because the number of tweaks is significant. As well as boosting the in-robot cameras to a twin HD-video solution, the team has given the bot an upgraded Atom 1.6GHz CPU, a better walking algorithm, better control of its servo's torque so the robots movements are more fluid and powerful, and a few other tweaks. But most significantly they've added in voice recognition from Nuance--the same innovative firm whose technology is behind the amazing powers of Apple's Siri digital personal assistant in the iPhone 4S. Of course Nao will react differently to voice commands than Siri, and it's unlikely to call your wife or set up a calendar entry on voice command.

You've probably noticed something about smartphones. They haven't been exciting lately. Chances are, your current smartphone looks and works a lot like your last one. Your next will probably seem pretty familiar, too. But there are signs that smartphones, and the ways we use them, could be about to significantly change -- even if no one can quite agree on exactly how.