Amazon And The Voice-Activated AI Future PYMNTS.com

If we told the average person in early 2013 that someday it was going to be very important to learn the correct way to greet your devices, the average person might have thought we'd gone mad. It wasn't that people didn't love their gadgets in the distant wilds of five years ago; nor did the idea of talking to a digital intelligence sound completely outside the realm of normal experience. In 2013, the world had been acquainted with Apple's Siri for almost two years, and Google's first crack at a smart, voice-activated assistant, "Google Now," was released in mid-July 2012. But the idea of voice-activated artificial intelligence (AI), capable of fulfilling more than very simple commands -- and, in fact, being able to "converse" in real-time with a human, recognize a user's voice through biometrics and develop more skills over time so it could gradually "learn" to do better -- seemed literally the stuff of science fiction or superhero movies. The idea that there would not only be that type of AI in the market, but that there would be so much of it out there that users would need to learn a variety of different "wake" commands to initiate conversation with their devices?