I am optimistic, AI winter is no longer the case this time.
We almost solved image/speech recognition in the past 5 years. Once those works went out of academia to real application, the amount of disruption to the current society is pretty hard to imagine.
We've made impressive progress but even with computer vision there is still a lot to do. For example, it's great that we can recognize certain objects are in a picture, but a lot of real-world applications depend on the exact location, e.g. image segmentation. Current state of the art models generate hundreds of similar object proposals which cannot realistically narrowed down to a single one to present to a user in an application.
It's a reference to Steve Job's infamous "You're holding it wrong" response[1] to complaints of iPhone 4's signal failing when held in a certain manner.
I don't feel like "getting the overall meaning of what you said" and "100% accurate voice transcription" are the same problems and comparing the two isn't fair. When I speak to you in a thick accent, it's OK if you only understand 1 out of 3 words because human-to-human communication is lossy and able to deal with misunderstood, misheard, or completely unintelligible data points. Transcription requires 100% percent accuracy because you want the written word to be exactly the same as the words that come out of your mouth. This is a much higher bar and is one that human-to-human speech rarely achieves.
It's hard to tell these days. Many people today fully accept the idea that human should adapt themselves to the existing machines and technologies, rather than design/adapt those machines and technologies to human needs.
We almost solved image/speech recognition in the past 5 years. Once those works went out of academia to real application, the amount of disruption to the current society is pretty hard to imagine.