The world talks back

Today, I spoke to a green, plastic dinosaur. In this post I'll discuss what this tells us about the future, and what the most important question will be for designers in the coming decade. More and more of the objects in our lives are going to have that ability to converse with us over the next decade. For most people, this phenomenon started with a bit of a whimper as we were exposed to smartphone services like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana. Over time these mostly disappointing voice-based personal assistants have got a bit better, but they still aren't good enough to make us all abandon apps and the keyboard, and their integration with other apps and services is only just beginning to happen.