At one time, voice recognition and artificial intelligence was a thing consumers only knew from fiction. More recently, Apple's Siri and Google's Voice Search brought it mainstream. Now researchers expect it to get even more common.

Recent A.I. breakthroughs have cracked the code on voice, and in perhaps 18 months, machines will be able to follow spoken instructions , according to Tuttle.

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Tuttle says as a result, more and more household items such as TVs, lights and thermostats will be able to take voice commands.

"By 2020, there will be 3 billion of these devices all around and fewer than 5 percent of these devices will have keyboards. This means that if you want to have rich interaction with your device, speech recognition is critical. The good news is that the technology is keeping pace, and speech recognition technology and understanding is so good, we're going to rely on it everyday," Tuttle said.



Tuttle believes voice-driven computing will be a $40 billion per-year market opportunity that is up for grabs, and by 2020, 200 billion searches per month will be done using voice.

Read MoreStephen Hawking warns A.I. threatens mankind

