Starting in 2011, Amazon set about quietly acquiring speech-recognition start-ups and hiring AI engineers and natural-language scientists. Those plans were put in place to help realize Bezos’s goal of building a computer that people could actually talk to, just as the crew converses with the starship Enterprise on his favorite TV show, Star Trek. Their work, over many years, resulted in the introduction of the Echo home speaker in 2014 and defined a new era of voice-activated computing. It was a perfect manifestation of Bezos’s pledge to think not about this quarter or next year but about
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