Apple have already hired writers for Siri; how many more years before its personality starts to change to match the tone and manner that you ask questions? Young children have already started to mis-identify Siri as a real person! There was also the film Her the other year which seems quite prescient. Regardless of if we ever get to real AI, it seems quite clear we're going to face intelligent-seeming computers in the near future, and we're going to start to interact with them almost as if they were intelligent. It's going to be an interesting future.
This is a huge tangent, I know. It just seems like compilers speaking to you like a human being is just one more facet of this change.
I thought this blog post on conversational UIs really sums up some of these trends, and it only takes a bit of imagination to imagine where this will go in 10, 20 years: http://interconnected.org/home/2015/06/16/conversational_uis
> Software isn't "cautious" or "ambitious", those are qualities of alive beings. But maybe it serves us to think so.
Also this:
> Our minds respond to speech as if it were human, no matter what device it comes out of. Evolutionary theorists point out that, during the 200,000 years or so in which homo sapiens have been chatting with an “other,” the only other beings who could chat were also human; we didn’t need to differentiate the speech of humans and not-quite humans, and we still can’t do so without mental effort.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117242/siris-psychologica...