How MindMeld Is Letting Companies Add Voice Recognition to Any AppThe days of talking to all of your devices are closer than you think.

In the 2013 movieHer,Joaquin Phoenix plays a man who falls in love with his cloud-based operating system, which has been given Scarlett Johansson's voice. She anticipates his moods, arranges his schedule—all he has to do is talk to her. Director Spike Jonze set the action in the near future, but according to Tim Tuttle, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Expect Labs, this type of anticipatory computing is already here.

"In the last two years, we've seen voice-recognition and artificial-intelligence research advance and become more accurate by 30 percent," he says. "That's more progress than we made in the last 10 years."