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OK ComputerStanford professor Clifford Nass says this kind of synthetic conversation is possible becauseof advances in voice and language recognition. It's no longer just a party trick, though it stillhas limits."[The technology] definitely has gotten much better," Nass says. "It's still not super accurate.Nowhere near the accuracy of even a 2-year-old child."Nass says an app like Esquire's can only work well when it tightly limits what theconversation we are having is about. Without context, such apps are lost.Still, many marketers see an opportunity. Some of the biggest technology companies in thecountry — from Facebook and Google to Microsoft and Amazon — are trying to figure how tobest monetize mobile advertizing."Mobile banner ads just have not been super successful," says Mike McSherry, a vicepresident at Nuance, a company that specializes in voice-recognition technology."Voice is providing this window to the world of information, and it can be far faster than typingor navigating small screens," he says, "which has been typically the challenge of smallmobile devices to date."Digital forecasting company eMarketer estimates mobile ads could be a $37 billion businessin the next few years. Nuance wants a big piece of that, and this month it released a mobilead platform that will let advertisers create ads we can talk to.Enlarge imageiNuance's Valentine's Dog House demo app uses voice technology.NuanceI played one of their demos, called Valentine's Dog House, for Clifford Nass."Who are you in trouble with?" the app asks."My wife," Nass replies."And how mad is she?"Even though Nass was sitting at his desk with a lollipop in his mouth, and even mumbling abit, the ad nailed it. He smiled to himself, chuckled and engaged with the ad.Nass says ads like these, when they work, have the potential to be incredibly powerfulbecause they interact with us in a profoundly human way."The human brain is built for speech, so anything that sounds like a voice, our brains justlight up and we get an enormous range of social and other responses," he says.54