Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa are among a growing army of intelligent assistants raising a cacophony of questions (all in Natural Language, of course) about man versus machine in the pursuit of a flawless customer experience. At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), 2017 was heralded to be "the year of voice recognition". The advent of Deep Learning has dramatically enhanced language technologies and, while there remains considerable progress to be made, Voice Recognition technology is already making audible waves in the insurance industry. Faceless computing Two key stories have ushered this "era of so-called faceless computing" into the insurance arena. In early January, Fukoku Mutual Life decided to make thirty-four employees redundant in favour of artificial intelligence.