Conversation-based user interfaces have been expanding prominently through Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, countless chatbots and many other alternatives. Design wise, conversational A.I.s are considered by many to be the future of UI, and it’s not hard to see why.

The 2D menus and buttons we interact with on a daily basis are merely abstractions of an implicit conversation — clicking on an app icon essentially means “open this app” and swiping right on Tinder translates into “I like this person” (or simply “Yes!”). As simple as current gestures may feel individually, talking will always feel more intuitive — it is, after all, the user interface humanity functions on.

Combine these ideas with the recent advancements in text-to-speech + voice-to-text + deep learning and A.I. just might have enough momentum to become a powerhouse in immersive environments, turning customized A.I. assistants into an industry standard in any piece of software.

In fact, it might come sooner than you think — Microsoft has recently announced it’ll be opening up Cortana to the developer community in 2017, allowing them to integrate the virtual assistant in anything — be it custom hardware or Virtual and Mixed Reality experiences.