If you had visited the Cambridge University Library in the late 1990s, you might have observed a skinny young man, his face illuminated by the glow of a laptop screen, camping out in the stacks. William Tunstall-­Pedoe had wrapped up his studies in computer science several years earlier, but he still relished the musty aroma of old paper, the feeling of books pressing in from every side. The library received a copy of nearly everything published in the United Kingdom, and the sheer volume of information—5 million books and 1.2 million periodicals—inspired him.

It was around this time, of course, that another vast repository of knowledge—the internet—was taking shape. Google, with its famous mission statement “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” was proudly stepping into its role as librarian to the planet. But as much as Tunstall-­Pedoe adored lingering in the stacks, he felt that computers shouldn’t require people to laboriously track down information the way that libraries did. Yes, there was great pleasure to be had in browsing through search results, stumbling upon new sources, and discovering adjacent facts. But what most users really wanted was answers, not the thrill of a hunt.

This article is adapted from Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think, by James Vlahos, to be published in March by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

As tools for achieving this end, search engines were almost as cumbersome as their book-stuffed predecessors. First, you had to think of just the right keywords. From the long list of links that Google or Yahoo produced, you had to guess which one was best. Then you had to click on it, go to a web page, and hope that it contained the information you sought. Tunstall-­Pedoe thought the technology should work more like the ship’s computer on Star Trek: Ask a question in everyday language, get an “instant, perfect answer.” Search engines as helpful librarians, he believed, must eventually yield to AIs as omniscient oracles.

This was a technological fantasy on par with flying cars, but Tunstall-­Pedoe set about making it a reality. He had been earning money as a programmer since the age of 13 and had always been particularly fascinated by the quest to teach natural language to machines. As an undergraduate, he had written a piece of software called Anagram Genius, which, when supplied with names or phrases, cleverly rearranged the letters. “Margaret Hilda Thatcher,” for instance, became “A girl, the arch mad-hatter.” (Years later, author Dan Brown used Anagram Genius to generate the plot-­critical puzzles in The Da Vinci Code.) Now, sequestered in the library, Tunstall-Pedoe began building a prototype that could answer a few hundred questions.

Two decades later, with the rise of voice computing platforms such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, the world’s biggest tech companies are suddenly, precipitously moving in Tunstall-­Pedoe’s direction. Voice-­enabled smart speakers have become some of the industry’s best-selling products; in 2018 alone, according to a report by NPR and Edison Research, their prevalence in American households grew by 78 percent. According to one market survey, people ask their smart speakers to answer questions more often than they do anything else with them. Tunstall-­Pedoe’s vision of computers responding to our queries in a single pass—providing one-shot answers, as they are known in the search community—has gone mainstream. The internet and the multibillion-­dollar business ecosystems it supports are changing irrevocably. So, too, is the creation, distribution, and control of information—the very nature of how we know what we know.

In 2007, having weathered the dotcom crash and its aftermath, Tunstall-­Pedoe and a few colleagues were close to launching their first product—a website called True Knowledge that would offer one-shot answers to all kinds of questions. At the time, theirs was still a heterodox goal. “There were people in Google who were completely allergic to what we were doing,” Tunstall-­Pedoe says. “The idea of a one-shot answer to a search was taboo.” He recalls arguing with one senior Google employee who rejected the notion of there even being such a thing as a single correct reply. The big search engines, despite having indexed billions of web pages, did not possess a deep understanding of user queries. Rather, they engaged in glorified guesswork: You typed a few keywords into the Google search bar, and the company’s PageRank system returned a long list of statistically backed conjectures about what you wanted to know.