In Spike Jonze's Oscar-nominated, futuristic film "Her," computers compose music, carry on seamless conversations with humans, organize emails instantaneously, and even fall in love. But what appears to be pure sci-fi has more grounding in actual science than the casual viewer might believe.

Stephen Wolfram, whose Wolfram Alpha drives the artificial intelligence-like component of Siri on the iPhone, thinks that an operating system like Samantha as depicted in the film is not only possible, the technology behind it...