We're almost halfway into 2017 (I know, can you believe it's end of June already?) Rapid improvements in key underlying technologies -- voice recognition and natural language processing – are making these "smart" assistants more capable of letting us use our various devices just by talking to them. The promise of these assistants, ranging from Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant to the newcomer, Samsung's Bixby, is that someday we will each have our own personal, always-listening AI which can respond to any wish and command, like Tony Stark's Jarvis in the movie Iron Man. It's a future vision of computing pulled directly from the pages of science fiction. This is heady stuff, but there are reasons to believe that voice may not become the next computing platform, at least not for a while.