If people all started to talk to their machines at the office the noise and confusion would be unbearable.

Voice control really only works in private settings. In your home and in your car. Anywhere else it won't be generally useful or practical.

Out of curiosity, how well does it work if you simply ask it to base the answer on Pubmed sources only, without any ranking or anything?

It allows for breaking changes; it doesn't require it.

Or I'm sure they could do another 1.x release with a new "hello world" function that they change the signature on for the 2.0 version otherwise.

I am/was a computational neuroscientist. There's way more papers published in neuroscience than any one person has a hope of reading.

The best way for me to keep up was to use an rss reader. The big publishers and publication portals (such as arxiv) all have rss feeds, usually per keyword, and you follow the ones that might interest you.

Then you use the filtering available in your feed reader to get rid of any item you obviously don't care about. I was typically left with ~100 papers every morning, with about 4-5 that I'd actually download.

One of these is not like the others.

"Prove something known empirically" is actually useful and important.