Voice-driven devices are much more than smartphones without a screen

A version of this essay was originally published at Tech.pinions, a website dedicated to informed opinions, insight and perspective on the tech industry. A great deal has been written recently on the growing importance of voice-driven computing devices, such as Amazon's Echo, Google Home and others like them. At the same time, there's been a long-held belief by many in the industry that software innovations will be the key drivers in moving the tech industry forward ("software is eating the world," as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously said more than five years ago). The combination of these two -- software for voice-based computing -- would, therefore, seem to be at the very apex of tech industry developments. Indeed, there are many companies now doing cutting-edge work to create new types of software for these very different kinds of computing devices.