In pursuit of the perfect AI voice

How developers are humanizing their virtual personal assistants. The virtual personal assistant is romanticized in utopian portrayals of the future from The Jetsons to Star Trek. It's the cultured, disembodied voice at humanity's beck and call, eager and willing to do any number of menial tasks. In its early real-world implementations, a virtual receptionist directed customers ('To hear more menu options, press 9′). It wasn't until 2011 that Apple released Siri and the public had its first interactions with a commercially viable, dynamic personal assistant. Since Siri's debut with the release of the iPhone 4S, Apple's massive customer base has only gotten larger; the company estimates that more than 700 million iPhones are currently in use worldwide. Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana debuted in 2014; Google Assistant followed in 2016.