AI or Outsourcing?

I was talking to one of our lab techs, Tony, this afternoon about outsourcing in the software industry, and in general. He brought up something I hadn't heard of before: outsourcing the fast food ordering process to remote sites. Apparently if you pull up to certain McDonalds and other restaurants you may actually be talking to somebody hundreds or thousands of miles away. It seems to me this can only lead one place eventually: to India, which handles most computer tech support calls already.

Then I started thinking about AI applications like voice recognition. Why can't Microsoft Word hook up somebody at an Internet-based "call center" in India that will take your dictation more reliably than any AI voice recognition can. Certainly they can do better than "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all." Potentially there are quite a lot of other little functions that computers aren't good at but that even a minimally trained human could do.