A year ago I wrote that 2016 would be the year that consumer AI went mainstream. In one sense, I was wrong. The average consumer still doesn’t interact with an AI application on a typical day. Siri, Cortana, Google Home, and Allo are making inroads but still have small reach when compared to, say, Android or iOS as a whole. Look Deeper Looking back, I realize that my angle of attack was wrong.

In October of 1994, Netscape released Netscape Navigator 1.0, the first commercial web browser. Over the next decade, the web went mainstream as it became increasingly usable. In October of 2011, Apple announced that Siri — the mobile personal assistant it acquired in 2010 — would ship on the iPhone 4S. Siri has continued to improve, as have Google Now, Amazon Echo, and a host of other solutions. 2016 will be the year that consumer AI goes mainstream.