Alexa is not coming to an office near you

If you've recently had your first interaction with a voice-based personal assistant like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, you might get the sense that artificial intelligence is just a few years away from being able to talk and act like a human. It will soon be capable of managing our schedules, troubleshooting technical issues, or even holding conversation. According to a recent Wall Street Journal piece titled "Alexa and Cortana May Be Heading to the Office," many businesses share that hope. One startup profiled in the piece uses "an Amazon Echo attached to the office ceiling for such tasks as adding events to their calendars," while another is building a virtual assistant to set meetings on behalf of human users. The belief that natural language processing is right around the corner seems to be widespread: About half of IT professionals in the Spiceworks survey cited in the article said they plan to use intelligent assistants in a corporate setting in the next three years.