Headless task completion within digital personal assistants

Techniques are described for headlessly completing a task of an application in the background of a digital personal assistant. A method can include speech recognition using the speech input to determine a spoken command, wherein the spoken command comprises a request to perform a task of a third-party application, and wherein the task is identified using a data structure that defines tasks of third-party applications invokable by spoken command; determining whether the task of the third-party application is capable of being headlessly executed; causing the third-party application to execute as a background process to headlessly execute the task when it is determined that the task of the third-party application is capable of being headlessly executed; and initiating a warm-up sequence of the third-party application while performing speech recognition and before completion of determining the spoken command.