>anybody that knows more about this stuff than your average consumer was likely quite skeptical of that pitch.
That probably was--or should have been the case. But it's one of those things that seems like it would be pretty straightforward. After all, if a fairly young child can do something, it seems like a computer wired up to the Internet could. And in fact, voice recognition has gotten quite good--at least for English speakers without a strong accent. But actually carrying on a conversation in natural language is a really hard problem, even if children can do so from a fairly young age.