This is what I started thinking about as I was reading the paranoid HN comments. I believe there's open source voice recognition but the challenging part is taking commands and making them actionable.
Defining commands and their corresponding actions is something I think an open source could actually do much more effectively than companies. When everyone in the world can contribute commands rather than a single team of software devs it is possible build up a much larger collection of them. I would really like the ability to add commands to a natural language command system when a command I use doesn't work. Also, I think that a reprogramable command system would open up an interesting programming paradigm where one could define new commands and actions in terms of other commands in the system. For example,
What's new?
> Unrecognized command
When I say "What's new" read the "In the news..." section of Wikipedia's main page.
That's a great idea. If this was used by a large group of people one could take the total commands used for a specific action that were programmed and make the n% most popular ones the new standard going forward.
Also, if there existed something like a phrase thesaurus that could be extremely useful for building out a list of commands. For instance, "What's the weather?" and "What's it like outside?" mean the same thing and if you searched for one in the phrase thesaurus a synonym for the other would pop up. Then all the computer would have to do is take the input phrase, search the thesaurus, and find a synonym that it recognizes.
