Her is the latest sci-fi romantic comedy to come from American director Spike Jonze. Set in the not-so-distant future, the film follows Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a complex and sensitive man who makes his living by writing beautiful, personal love letters for other people. The film shows us a glimpse of his life as he struggles with a heartbreaking divorce while trying to re-establish his place in the world. Seeking out companionship, Theodore becomes intrigued by an advanced operating system known as OS One, which renames itself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). As both their desires and needs grow, so does their love for one another. It’s a strange but deeply interesting relationship, something I will explore later.

The world we see is utopian, blending design, technology and nature together in a way that is seamless and harmonious. From the streets to the elevated walkways, everything is clean and extremely well kept. This is something only future logistical and waste management technologies can achieve, apparently. Local authorities, please take note. You would never guess it, but the setting is Los Angeles, with select scenes shot in Shanghai to compensate for, let’s say, the lack of cleanliness. It would be strange to see L.A. stuck in a low-rise suburban limbo a hundred years from now, wouldn’t you agree?

Throughout the story we encounter a plethora of technologies that are used effortlessly by Theodore. “Samantha, do this”, “Samantha, do that”. Everything is controlled by voice, killing all need for computer peripherals. We also begin to see who wears the pants in this relationship, but I digress. Jonze’s vision for technology was for it to be subtle and discreet — there when we need it, but never the main focus. It seems that technology in the future isn’t something you show off. Instead, it takes a back seat to functionality, automating a lot of the tasks we have to do manually today. Everything is smart, everything is connected.

Technology has also taken a step towards vintage, blending advanced hardware with rustic and traditional design themes. It is comfortably stylish and non-distracting, and always seems to just get out of our way. Interacting with artificial intelligence has become the norm, with many — if not all — devices incorporating it in some way. AI has essentially become a cheap commodity, leaving the rest of technology to form around and integrate with it.

Although the level of AI used in the film is many, many years ahead of where we are today, Theodore still uses plenty of existing technology, only in a more advanced form. From the more obvious devices, like his earbuds or smartphone, to the more discreet, such as his automated home or ultra fast wireless connection, let’s see just how far current technology has to evolve before it meets the standards set in the film.

Let’s take the easiest and most obvious example — voice recognition. Since half of the movie is spent talking to a computer, the software it’s running has to be pretty decent at picking up what you say. I’m not talking about actually understanding what you are saying — that lies more in the realm of virtual assistants — but simply being able to transcribe words.

Plenty of software like this exists today, even in my living room. Heck, I’ve been shouting at my Xbox One ever since I got it. But seriously, one of the best programs available is offered by a company called Nuance, which specializes in speech technology. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is able to record and turn your speech into text as well as control other programs with your voice. With up to 99% accuracy, it’s amazing that someone like Apple hasn’t snatched the company up. The times I have tried to use Siri, I found it often wouldn’t understand me, instead interpreting my British accent in some weird prejudiced way. Overall I found Siri to be rather useless, and dare I say racist if you give the whole accent thing a nod. Anyway, let’s move on.

The other half of communication with Samantha is communicating with her through earbuds. In the film, Theodore uses something similar to a Bluetooth wireless earpiece except that it’s tiny and is always connected to his smartphone. The size of the device also warrants a valid question about how it holds a charge, or if it even has a battery? Then other questions start popping up, like how does it pick up sound accurately? The earpiece is so small and doesn’t direct itself in any way towards the mouth. My guess is that it relies on inner ear vibrations to distinguish between the user’s voice and ambient noise, but that’s as far as my guess will go. Either way, the microphone it uses must be extremely good at isolating a single voice, especially when Theodore whispers a command in a room full of people.

As a side note, I imagine the act of having to charge a device will be non-existent in the future. If wireless charging really becomes a reality then, similar to Wi-Fi, everywhere will be blanketed in a wireless charging signal. This would allow anyone and everyone to charge devices on the go. Again, similar to Wi-Fi, we would turn on wireless charging and let it roam for signals as we do with current technology.

After watching the film I began to search around to see if I could find anything remotely similar to the ear device Theodore uses. I stumbled across a couple of poorly designed and clunky wireless earbuds, but they were just that — earbuds. I wanted to find something smarter, something I could speak into and have it interact with me. Then I came across the ERA by Jawbone. It’s not exactly like the ones in the film, but it comes close-ish.

First, it’s pretty damn minute. Bearing in mind that it’s for your ear, at 1.83 inches long, it’s hard not to applaud Jawbone for packing so much punch into something so small. The ERA claims to use military grade technology that it has dubbed NoiseAssassin. Even though the device barely stretches past your ear, demos show that it is very capable at detecting the user’s voice and eliminating background noise. The ERA can also pair with either Siri or Google Now depending on what device you have. iPhone users might as well not bother; it’ll save you the frustration when you ask Siri “can you call me an ambulance” and she decides your name is “Ambulance”. Can you tell I don’t like Siri?

Offering an even deeper level of interaction, with the Jawbone app you can keep track of your meetings in Agenda, which the ERA will then alert you about in a voice of your choosing. Naturally I prefer the Bombshell voice, but after a while you’ll wish it was her picking up the phone and not your mate Dave. Of course you can also listen to music with high definition sound quality, even if it is just one ear.

All in all, the ERA is the closest thing you will find to the earbuds used in the film. Without sounding picky, I would like to see them get smaller to the point where it doesn’t look ridiculous to wear one — here’s to you, Mr. Minicab Driver. My point is that Bluetooth earpieces exist today for one purpose, to make calls. Once voice interaction becomes more mainstream, there will be more demand for wireless earpieces that look better and provide more functionality, with more money flowing into that market.

If you’re fond of films like The Matrix and The Terminator like my flatmate Ron, then you’ll hate Her. Ok, you may not end up hating it, but it does take a more philosophical approach to technology, unlike what we see from the cold-hearted sentinels and T-800. Similar to the character Roy Batty in Blade Runner, an advanced android who understands compassion and has a love for humanity and life, Samantha, too, shares these values as she explores the world with Theodore. She is able to grow and learn from her experiences. She is able to make decisions informed by past ones. This is what we call machine learning, or deep learning as it is commonly referred to.

Deep learning helps us move beyond simply engineering computer systems to something closer to biological computing, or how we humans process information. If we come across a new piece of information our brains don’t just shut down, we try and interpret the information and make new neural connections. Today, new computer chips work similarly to this and are already being used at a few giant tech firms. Facebook, for example, already uses deep learning algorithms to better target their advertisements to users. They also recently hired Yann LeCun, a veteran in the field of artificial intelligence, to head up the development of deep learning tools that will help Facebook better analyze data and behavior. It could allow Facebook to automatically tag your pictures and share them with people who it thinks will enjoy seeing them.

But the problem is that deep learning has only been successful for applications such as image and speech recognition, not so much for natural language processing. This is due to the need for natural language understanding, which involves a machine being able to comprehend something it reads. It needs to understand semantics, the study of symbols and signs, in order to make sense of a text. It needs to derive meaning from words and their context. Today, there are some companies who are starting to make a dent in the task ahead.

Which leads us, inevitably, to Google.

Google’s conversational search uses an algorithm called Hummingbird, which is capable of analyzing all of the words in a conversational phrase or sentence, as opposed to just picking out key words. For example, if you ask Google “where is the best place to buy video games near my house?” it will understand that “place” most likely means a physical store, recognize that “video games” are sold in electronics shops, and pull information for these types of stores around your home. Google will then deliver the desired information in a way that mimics human syntax, or the way humans construct sentences. It does this by simply adding pronouns and verbs, such as ‘it’ and ‘is’, to form responses that feel more human. It’s a big step for Google, which pulls this information not only from its Knowledge Graph but from all web pages as well. But when everything is said and done, we are still a long way off from hitting the mark.

Now, is it possible to have an actual relationship with a computer program? This question goes all the way back to the 1960s. A man named Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program called ELIZA. It was an early, primitive example of natural language processing that operated by processing users’ responses to scripts. At the time, there were those who mistook the program for a human as it was created to mimic a psychotherapist. With psychotherapy, Weizenbaum could side-step the problem of giving the program a database of real-world knowledge because therapeutic situations are one of the few in which someone can reply to a statement with a question. As some researchers discovered, there were some humans that took a liking to the program, suggesting that some day humans may seek out artificial intelligence as a form of companionship.

After watching the film I had gained somewhat of an unhealthy obsession with artificial intelligence. I trawled website after website looking for my ‘Samantha’. Of course I came across the likes of IBM’s Watson, but that sort of technology won’t be released to the general public any time soon. However, I did stumble across a couple of projects that are in the pipeline and should be released later this year.

Making sure that it doesn’t get left behind in the virtual assistant race with Apple and Google, Nuance, the company I mentioned earlier, is working on a project codenamed Wintermute. Nuance wants to make personal assistants, well, truly personal. It wants to save individual user profiles in the cloud so that whatever device you use, your assistant will always be there. The demo I watched on Engadget shows the application performing basic tasks such as listening to music and showing sports scores, but also adds in snippets of its own personality, relying on your profile information to offer clever quips that relate to you. It also understands conversational commands. Because the application will run across all of your devices, the program understands when you are using a different device. So for example, if you say “play that song I was listening to earlier” to your TV, it will understand that you were listening to a specific song on your smartphone or computer and continue playback right where you left off. The user profiles will be detailed enough to allow you to say “throw on the game”, as shown in the demo. That’s pretty clever. The project is still very much in the early stages but will hopefully be hitting shelves either later this year or early 2015.

The next piece of kit I found is really interesting. I’m not sure whether it leans on the side of gimmicky, but the CEO and founder, Patrick Levy Rosenthal, promises that the device will be “the first home console with true artificial intelligence”. Sound the trumpets for EmoSPARK. Built by Emoshape, the project is featured on IndieGogo and has just finished raising money to meet its $100,000 goal. People are getting extremely excited, perhaps a little too much, over what it can do so let’s look at what the product promises.

According to reports and the information on its IndieGogo page, EmoSPARK is an emotionally aware artificial intelligence console that is committed to your happiness, or so it says. The machine can learn what makes a person happy or excited and can provide tailored, relevant information in response. The device can measure an individual’s unique behavior and responses to stimuli, and will create a customized Emotional Profile Graph which it will use to virtually ‘feel’ senses and express those desires according to the user. The IndieGogo page also says that, over time, the cube will develop its own personality and warns you to be gentle with it. While it looks promising, it’s hard not to doubt the extent of its capabilities. I hope that the project really takes off and fulfills its dream of eventually running home automation systems; otherwise all we’re left with is an over-priced tamagotchi.

I feel like I’ve rambled on long enough, but there’s still one more thing I want to cover quickly before I depart. In Her we watch Theodore play video games in his apartment. But instead of looking at a screen or wearing a headset, he interacts with a hologram that fills his entire living room. Though I doubt we will be able to create artificially intelligent characters that can interact with and respond to stimuli in the physical world, I do think it will be possible to play video games in this way somewhere in the next 30 years. And there’s one company that is trying to get us there faster.

Voxiebox is a holographic gaming device that lets users control a holographic image via a hand-held gamepad. The technology inside is relatively simple, at least more so than you would think. A housed projector beams up an image on to a screen, which then vibrates up and down at a very rapid speed. It is the vibrations that make it appear 3D. Unless you look directly at the display’s base, the image quality never diminishes even as you move around the device. The overall quality of the image is, however, rather poor and if the device wants to make it into the homes of gamers it will have to increase the resolution.

It’s still very much in the development stage, only offering a couple of games that are very early builds, but nevertheless it’s one of the few companies pioneering this sort of technology for video gaming purposes. As one article mentioned, it would be a great medium to replace board games.

Some of the more subtle technologies we see in the film aren’t even discussed, or really brought to mind until you think about it. How is Theodore able to constantly run the OS One program on his smartphone? What sort of speeds would wireless data signals have to operate at? These are questions that don’t require an answer in the future world we see; humans and technology have reached equilibrium, a harmonious state where everything just works. Technology moves out of the way. It doesn’t consume us, it helps us. Jonze was brilliant to let technology grow organically from now until the time of the film, unlike other sci-fi films that depict future worlds vastly different from our own (Blade Runner, The Running Man, The Fifth Element). He took today’s current technologies and extrapolated what their uses could be and how we would interact with them. In my opinion, he’s accurately foreseen how some future technology will be used, even the abandonment of private cars. Did you notice that, by the way?

Was there anything missing that you thought Jonze should have addressed from a technology standpoint? What about wearables? I would love to hear your thoughts if you have any. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @morrydraco.