Google joined other tech companies determined to establish “conversation” as the medium through which humans engage with the apparatus. In time, the obsession with voice may be surpassed or joined by others so that merely thinking a thought or waving a finger can translate into and initiate action. For now, there are compelling reasons for the race to the spoken word. The first is obvious: reliable voice recognition can translate a sprawling landscape of service interactions into low-cost automated processes of theoretically unlimited scale and scope, a fact that has been noted by labor economists for some time. The competitive race between a new crop of “personal digital assistants” is best understood from this point of view. The voice that rises to dominance, the One Voice, will be the colossus of behavioral surplus pipelines with a potentially insurmountable competitive advantage in its ability to corner and kidnap the dominant share of human experience.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 810