The Rise of AI Voice Assistants in the Enterprise Navigate the Future

From Apple's Siri to Microsoft's Cortana to Amazon's Alexa, talking AI assistants now willingly, and most of the time accurately, respond to our commands. Voice is the new interface. Voice adds many opportunities for interacting with computers at the time and place of our choosing, with new locations and activities including driving, exercising, cooking, and operating machinery. The rapid progress in natural language processing (NLP) over the last five years has been behind the development of much improved software which "understands" human speech and can respond at a high level of accuracy and relevance. The same machine learning methods--deep neural networks--that spurred the progress in NLP have also contributed to a significant expansion of the range of activities the software can support.