Today I am grateful for my radio because it talks to me and tells me what is happening in the world, it costs me less than £30 yet the comfort it brings is priceless. I always thought that in this time period machine to human conversations would have taken a big leap.
When I was a young boy I would to watch a TV show called Night rider. It is about a car with artificial intelligence that can talk and drive itself. The talking car would often have deep and meaningful conversions with the driver and even had a name, KIT.
Now it is around 30 years later and cars don't really talk much, some cars have built in Sat-nav that speaks out directions to the diver but this is far from a conversation.
My image of the 2000s was always that everything talks; When you open your front door the house itself greets you and asks how your journey was. You would ask the TV to turn on and it would say yes sir and turn on and your wallet would say "hi mate how are you? " Then you would talk to the house again and ask it if it could play your favourite music and change the colour of the lights.
To be fair you can talk to your phone but it doesn't really understand what you are saying in a way that would be adequate for conversation.
When machines can converse with people the way they do in Night Rider and Star Trek then that would be very interesting because a person could have many artificial friends and get loads of counselling.
I wonder if there are machines that are made that don't do anything but converse with people? I will keep a look out for such a product.
