Moviegoers are familiar with the fact that criminals want to talk outside and in person for fear of phones being tapped or bugs planted in buildings. But what would you think if a silver screen mafioso said, “We don’t talk in here; I just bought a new toaster”?

That’s not that far off.

The New York Times has a great in depth profile of Nuance Communications, the Burlington company behind Siri’s voice recognition technology, that both highlights the company’s dominance in that space and raises a number of interesting issues about the technology. For Nuance, Siri and its competitors are just the beginning:

Mr. Sejnoha, the company’s chief technology officer, and other executives are plotting a voice-enabled future where human speech brings responses from not only smartphones and televisions, cars and computers, but also coffee makers, refrigerators, thermostats, alarm systems and other smart devices and appliances.

Useful and terrifying in equal measure. It’d be great to finally make the television remote obsolete, but do we want a full audio record of what goes on in the privacy of our homes? That may be where we’re headed, as Nuance claims “aside from the federal government, it has amassed the largest archive of recorded speech in the United States.”

The full article is well worth a read as it details the company’s history (it’s an acquisition machine) and discusses other risks of speaking to computers, including some experts’ worry that it could be psychologically confusing for people.

As with most questions like this, my own hope is that technology can address the problems it generates. Nuance’s Dragon TV product idly records what’s being said so it can get better at speech recognition, but you can imagine any number of ways around this. Either customers could opt out, or the system could delete conversations on a regular basis.

Welcome to the wild world of mainstream voice recognition, where your microwave complains you two don’t talk anymore.