Inc. Echo Spot, from left, Echo, Echo Plus, and Fire TV devices sit on display during the company's product reveal launch event in downtown Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2017. According to a new report, Singapore is on the cusp of the voice technology revolution. Nearly half of the population has tried voice technology services such as Apple's Siri, Samsung's S Voice and Google Assistant, and a quarter of them use such services monthly. With Amazon entering the market this year, the potential for further uptake is high as more advanced products and applications hit the market. Voice technology has been with us for many years now – from automated voice recognition phone systems that failed to understand accents, to simple voice-to-text dictaphones that produced inaccurate copy – but the failings of these systems prevented widespread uptake.

A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze's new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough. After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn't a movie about technology. With that, the film took shape. Sure, it takes place in the future, but what it's really concerned with are human relationships, as fragile and complicated as they've been from the start. Of course on another level Her is very much a movie about technology. One of the two main characters is, after all, a consciousness built entirely from code.