Amazon's Alexa or Google's Home can throw out some amusing responses when they don't quite understand the nuances of language and accents, or simply get their answers hopelessly wrong.
But these quirks of the technology are only going to fade into our memories (or become Twitter memes) as the platforms continue their rapid move into the mainstream of consumer-brand engagement.
Over the past year, voice and language technologies have started to hit new milestones.
Microsoft announced last year that its speech transcription capabilities had surpassed human error levels.
What’s happened since then is that tens of millions of new voice first devices have flooded the market and are capturing thousands of hours of sample audio to further learn every day.
While speech recognition for simple commands is getting better, the improvements will trickle down to other areas of speech recognition such as noise suppression, far field voice interaction, and even multi-speaker interaction.