Robotic Nation Evidence

This article provides an example of how good "speech recognition" and "language interpretation" software capabilities are getting: Talk Your Way Out of Trouble. From the article:

Using voice-recognition middleware developed by ScanSoft, Lifeline can recognize over 5,000 words and 100,000 phrases. In practice, that means that the game's main character, Rio, will understand anything that's relevant to her predicament, as well as many things that aren't.

Lifeline is thus a unique step toward deeper player immersion in the game world, but not simply because of the technology. It's because although Rio is the main character, "you" are not Rio -- "you" are another survivor, trapped in the security room of the space station, who is watching Rio on the security monitors and giving her advice. So in real life you're sitting in a chair with a headset on, holding a controller and watching a monitor, while "you" in the game does the exact same thing.

It won't be long before the "person" who takes your order at the drive-through, or who takes your call on the help line, is a robot rather than a human being.