The inventor of Siri says Amazon's Echo and Alexa are 'incomplete'

Amazon's voice-controlled speaker Echo and its Alexa software have been so successful that even rivals such as Google and reportedly Apple are developing competing versions. But Babak Hodjat, the inventor of the technology behind Apple's voice recognition system Siri, doesn't believe in Echo and Alexa's hype. He thinks they still lack one major component that makes human-machine conversations more complete: visual interactions. "It has to be augmented with all sorts of other visual cues, interactions, and maybe show some icons to allow the user to be able to click," Hodjat told Business Insider. "A solely speech recognition based system with no other user interface or contextual elements is incomplete."