A Cambrian Explosion In AI Is Coming

You can call it a Virtual Personal Assistant, an Intelligent Agent, an Intelligent Interface or whatever you wish. The era of the assistant that began with Siri will eventually dominate the way people interact with mobile devices, computers, cars, wearables, appliances and every other piece of technology that requires complex human-machine interaction. Nearly all of the large Internet players have now launched or are working on some effort to win this next-generation paradigm and it's the earliest of days. Despite the massive uptake of assistants spurred by Apple's Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft Cortana, the market and technologies for this paradigm remain in their adolescence. Siri was the first chapter in a much longer, larger story that reminds me of the original iPhone launch in 2007.