As far as “cracking the foundations of digital,” there is a presumption that you’ve read enough of our work to know our perspective there. We take a media deterministic position (cf. Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong), which states that rituals surrounding a medium change the nature of the message conveyed. For example, as our culture has become ever more literate, our information processing has evolved from oral means to visual means. This is manifest in the way we process information on the web, by scanning textual artifacts before deciding whether to read them.

If these practices revert back to using more audio artifacts, it changes the very nature of the messages we convey. Scanning will take a less important role in our information processing, replaced by listening to snatches of audio. How we decide what is relevant in an audio stream requires an entirely different set of mental processes than we use when we scan text. Optimizing audio streams for these mental processes will be far different than it currently is for the scanning behavior. This will change the very messages we choose to communicate. That seems like a large enough crack in the foundations of digital to serve as a starting place for our inquiry.

You’ll notice on Star Trek there’s never a gang of people sitting around at their consoles all talking to the computer at once. When they talk to the computers, they’re either alone or there’s only on person talking and it’s not private, such as when one of them is speaking for everyone nearby. This is because sound waves are not private – to the point of being disruptive to others nearby. That’s why we all use earphones.

Genuinely effective voice input is liable to be a great tool, it’s on the path to simplifying interfaces for wider audiences, etc., but enabling portable devices to the point of “cracking the foundations of digital media” is a bit overstated.