[afrancis]

I would argue that you are generalising based on looking at a particular model of how we use digital assistants. How about scenarios where organisations and individual develop digital assistants that are not financed by an advertising model? Or for that matter, the underlying NLP is not based on a cloud computing model?

[mistytoe]

That's kinda the problem: there are no non-profit, voice recognition DA's out there (presumably because voice recognition requires a lot of research and a ton of audio samples - I think, Mozilla tried to get into this?).

We got Google Now, Alexa, Siri and Cortana. Google Now and Alexa are obviously tied into an eco system that has one goal: engaging the user till he buys something. With Siri and Cortana its more like the old "lock the customer in (so he eventually buys more of our stuff)" thing.