For over four decades, our research community has taken remarkable strides in advancing human language technologies. This has resulted in the emergence of spoken dialogue interfaces that can communicate with humans on their own terms. For the most part, however, we have assumed that these interfaces are static; it knows what it knows and doesn’t know what it doesn’t. In my opinion, we are not likely to succeed until we can build interfaces that behave more like organisms that can learn, grow, reconfigure, and repair themselves, much like humans. In this paper, I will argue my case and outline some new research challenges. Index Terms: speech-based interfaces, dialogue systems 1.