Bruce Balentine's new book

Just started reading Bruce Balentine's new book, "It's Better to Be a Good Machine Than a Bad Person," and from the few pages I have read so far, it promises to be a very good and useful book.
Here is a quick nugget:

So speech as a business has been driven by enterprise buyers that deploy the technology for end users who have no say in the matter. In other words, IVR. (Emphases are his.) (p. 197)

Then he goes on to make the following provocative statement:

End users do not value ASR highly. Nor are they likely to do so--at least in very large numbers--at any time in the future. (Emphasis is his.) (p. 197)

Now, before you rush to dump your Nuance stock, Balentine is quick to qualify his statement with, "this book is not at all negative about speech technology" and "certain speech market niches--for example, IVR--are so important from a business perspective that their value is unquestionable (and oddly, not yet very well-mined)".

Balentine's aim seems to be to want to shock us into lowering the prevailing unreasonable "Jetsonian" expectations about ASR and to settle down to solving real-problems in the real world. Or as he puts it quite well:

The key to solving the business problem of speech technologies is to let go of the future and to start working on the present. (p. 199)

Amen!

As for what "Jetsonian" means:

Jetsonian thinking goes like this: 'No problem is so great that we can't overcome it with technology. And no task is so trivial that it's not worth automating. The future is open-ended, and advancement has no cost. It is our manifest destiny to create new and complicated things in the name of progress, and even in the absence of needs.' (p. 109)