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Google Home and Amazon's Echo are the most famous, but a whole raft of these gadgets is preparing to flood the market. One of the most advanced will likely come from Baidu, the Chinese tech giant that, like Google, began as a search engine and now has its tendrils in all sorts of digital and physical spaces. Andrew Ng, Baidu's chief AI scientist, calls these devices "conversational computers," and he's a key reason any of them have learned to talk in the first place. A former AI researcher at Stanford, Ng is best known for spearheading the Google Brain initiative, an ambitious artificial-intelligence project that helped advance Silicon Valley's understanding of deep-learning techniques. Instead of being programmed to respond to specific actions, a deep learning system is fed massive amounts of data from which it is able to discern patterns over time, loosely mimicking how the human mind absorbs information. Ng's system at Google famously figured out what a cat looks like after scanning millions of online images.

Demo of the "Little Fish" home assistant, powered by the DuerOS conversational computer operating system. Speak to it to tell it what you want. Its large screen also makes browsing food delivery menus, videoconferencing, etc. easier.

How do you register your child for primary school? Somewhere, in the millions of pages of your local government website, there are instructions, but how do you find them? She's a "chatbot," a conversational application written by Singapore's government to help citizens navigate its many sites. Jamie's smart, too: Even though our intrepid user (me) was browsing a government tech site, Jamie knew the question was better answered by the Ministry of Education. Jamie's an example of how new conversational interfaces, backed by huge cloud-based knowledge bases and inferencing, promise to change forever how we relate to computers.