VUIs have come a long way since their 1950s inception. The VUIs of today are more similar to science-fiction dreams than ever. With just my voice, I can request a song (from a list of millions), order a car to come pick me up, find out the population of Uzbekistan, or send a message to someone thousands of miles away.

VUIs have not caught on everywhere yet, but their popularity is growing. A recent Business Insider article estimates that 504 million people will have used digital assistants, and projects by 2021 that number will grow to 1.8 billion.^[54] Many of these interactions are already via voice, and as natural-language understanding technology improves, no doubt more of those actions, especially those in your home, will be voice-driven.

Recently, I called my dad to wish him happy birthday. We asked our Amazon Echo to sing happy birthday, and the four of us—myself, my husband, our son, and Alexa—sang together. Alexa is becoming a trusted member of our household that we speak to every day. When my son asked us how to spell a word while doing his homework and we didn’t tell him, he said, “Fine, I’ll just ask Alexa!” When I had to reboot my router and wanted to see if the Echo was connected, I spontaneously asked, “Alexa, are you working?” She replied, “Everything seems to be working.” How much better is that than looking at flashing lights or a graph on my smartphone?

Right now, home assistants like the Echo and Google Home are fun gadgets. They are luxuries that might even seem like frivolous toys. But there is a reason that movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, and Her use VUIs as important parts of the story: it’s seamless communication with computers. Humanity yearns to communicate. When no one’s around, we talk to our pets and our TVs. We want to talk to our computers, too. Until recently it has not been a real possibility. And we still have a long way to go. But with the right design principles, VUIs don’t need to be a simple gimmick. They can fundamentally change the way we interact with technology, making it so that we have to act less like computers, and more like people.