…Project Wintermute [is] a platform agnostic voice recognition service that lives in the cloud…. intelligently saving search queries and context across platforms.
from Nuance hopes to make cross-platform voice recognition a reality with Project Wintermute | The Verge.
As a platform-agnostic personal assistant, Wintermute would be perfectly positioned to free users from vendor-delineated ecosystems. Its ability to work with multiple—in an ideal world, all—vendors' ecosystems, would free users to use whatever ecosystems' components they wanted, with Wintermute serving then as a PDI-level (Personal Digital Infrastructure, i.e., the users' ecosystem of hardware, software, content, services, and social connections) service, or a property of the PDI.
Imagine: Whatever you want to use or access, regardless of whether it is beholden to iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, webOS, or Blackberry—just talk to Wintermute, and she'll take care of it. Not quite Jarvis1, but a step in the right direction.
1 Jarvis is the name of Tony Stark's, a.k.a., Iron Man's, AI assistant in the "Iron Man" (2008, 2010) and "Marvel's The Avengers" (2012) movies.