Shout at the devil: the confusing world of talking to computers

The most important players in this new world are the "digital assistants:" Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Facebook M, Google Assistant, and a handful of third-party players. These, say their makers, will be our computing familiars, the programs that we'll spend most of our time talking to. They'll be accessible on different platforms (phones, watches, cars, home hubs) but keep tabs on our personal data, schedules, and location, across an entire network. And thanks to machine learning, they'll understand human speech better than any computers before, able to grok context and slang, and, eventually, emotion and intent. Assistants like this will offer us ambient computing.