There’s a lot of excitement about messaging and virtual assistant technologies today. Facebook have launched a chat API, Google have released their natural language API, Microsoft are poised to bring Project Oxford to market as a product, and Apple still retain tight control on Siri. There’s a lot of opportunity here to create useful applications, and the race is on to be the first with the Next Big Thing:

All appear to be efforts to commoditize both speech recognition and natural language understanding. In this context, “commodity” means “ubiquity,” and that bodes well for the large, incumbent solutions providers like IBM, Nuance, Google, and Microsoft. They all stand to benefit by selling more products and services when people ask for solutions that understand the words they say (in addition to text).

There’s a lot to be excited about here, but I’m skeptical about voice as an interface can ever be as efficient as the loop between physical interaction and updating a screen, namely with a terminal. I wonder if the future holds more technically savvy users that don’t want your dumbed-down interface or broadly available and easy to use computers. Personally, I want a future where everyone runs their own cloud server.