Alexandre de Brébisson, the CEO and cofounder of Lyrebird, says, "If we are now getting pretty good at imitating human voice, image, and video, we are still far away from modeling a individual language model." That, de Brébisson points out, would probably require artificial general intelligence, the type of AI that has consciousness and can understand abstract concepts and make decisions as humans do. Some experts believe we're decades away from creating general AI. Others think we'll never get there.

Indeed, in-person communication and touch and feel of the products in stores have not been topped by any achievements of e-commerce yet. And just like AI was able to significantly enhance the online experience with sophisticated recommendations algorithms and chatbots, there is a place for it in the physical world as well. Robotics powered by advanced NLP capabilities could be the next step in retail that will bring online and offline shopping experience much closer. In fact, the natural language processing market's size is estimated to grow from 7.63 billion in 2016 to 16.07 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of over 16%.