Smartphone users have gotten used to speaking to virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri and Google Now, and a new set of startups are guessing users will be excited about talking with devices from thermostats to smartwatches.

“There is a very big fascination about man talking to machines,” says Alex Lebrun, founder of Wit.ai, which provides speech recognition services for Internet of Things devices. “There is a kind of cultural fascination with that, starting with 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

And even once the novelty wears off, makers of voice recognition tools are betting they’ll be won over by the convenience of simply speaking to their appliances instead of hunting for remote controls or tablets and smartphones with control apps.

“Our long-term goal is to give users complete autonomy over their homes and smart products,” Insteon CEO Joe Dada said this summer in announcing the home automation company would be integrating Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana into the Windows Phone app that controls its lights, thermostats, and other networked devices. “Adding a voice-driven, personal assistant into the mix is just another way that we can make people’s lives easier.”

And vendors say they’re working to make sure 2001’s vision of out of control computers doesn’t turn out too prophetic, by integrating passwords and user voice recognition features to make sure users can control just who can order their appliances around.

“It’s what we call speaker authentication, or speaker ID,” says Lebrun. “This is exactly the kind of thing we’ll add in the next months to the API.”

The possibility of appliances responding to unauthorized commands was a joke on 30 Rock in 2011, with a voice-controlled TV reacting to on-screen dialogue, and, earlier this year, some Xbox owners claimed a Breaking Bad commercial showing characters playing a voice-controlled Xbox actually activated their video game systems.