While "voice activation" is being touted as the hottest development in communications and smart technology, the most effective kind has been part of families and cultures around the world for centuries.
It's simply called - "family glue."
This is the warm, human connection, the voices we hear at various stages throughout our lives that help ensure we keep history, memories and culture alive. And, in the process, create a lasting legacy.
While the tech chatter today marvels at Samsung's talking refrigerator, the Amazon Echo with Alexa Voice, the popularity of Siri and the coming generation of robots that respond to the tone of your voice, family glue is as vital as ever ... if not more so when there are so many potential distractions.
This kind of glue shapes who we are, what we believe, and how we will lead our lives. If we do our part well, it helps pave the way for those who follow.
From the moment of birth, there's often that one person in a family who is the glue that provides the context for each unique life that comes after. It might start with a grandparent - then passed on to the mom or the dad, and, with time, someone from the next generation.
That person treasures what has made the family special. It is both a responsibility and a privilege.
Without that glue, family dinners would be different. No one sharing history and telling stories that bring frayed sepia photographs to life. No tales of deeds and misdeeds. No talk about a homeland or the journeys that brought earlier generations from where they were born to a place where they would build a family and a career. Nothing about the hard times, the early years ... and nothing about how change has made for new opportunities.
Without that glue, there would be no chatter about family recipes while standing beside the kitchen stove and recreating favorites even though everything had always been measured by "what Grandma taught me."
And there would be none of that talk about mistakes which meant that some went down the wrong path while others took a turn for the better.
In hearing the stories of those who came before us, we learn. And in the telling of how we learned, others can learn.
Missing those stories would leave out an essential part of learning and of life.
Interesting enough, the very same glue is also what makes businesses strong. The founders of those businesses - by their very presence, force of personality and entrepreneurial spirit - started on their route by fostering an environment that emphasized and kept kindled the values they believed would lead to success.
While it might have just been instinctive at first, they never lost sight of the importance of a reputation that built a culture to earn customers and clients and keep them coming back for more.
Even when a business is mature or the founder is no longer around, here, too, glue is personal. Story telling - so crucial to business in ensuring its future - makes real and passes on the lessons for future generations of employees and leaders.
So, whether in families or business, the message is the same: it's the glue that gives history, memories and culture a voice and creates a legacy.
After all, as Antonio said in Shakespeare's The Tempest: "what's past is prologue."