[Semaphor]

I'm using it for exactly the same things I used it to back then (99% kitchen stuff: timers, conversions and playing music, 1% setting the lights and asking for the weather), it's not as if I expect more now. But she has more issues understanding me.

Luckily I'll get my first rPi zero on Monday to experiment with replacing her.

[WorldMaker]

Related to that and that feeling that we aren't doing much more than the same features and these are just getting worse at those features, I think it is an easy question how much of this has been a "law of diminishing returns" and that so many new features come at the cost of the understanding and recognition of the old features. Maybe we didn't really want all that many new features and developers and product managers trying to justify their budgets' existence has been part of the problem (spending too much money developing new stuff is not a problem often expected here on HN).

I know that I sometimes lament the loss of Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360-era voice recognition (proto-Cortana). It was absolutely stupid, had very few features, but it ran entirely on the device itself and was rock solid at recognizing the features it did support. You could just about whisper "Xbox pause" to a Kinect in the middle of an action scene of a loud movie with surround sound and expect it to respond immediately on a dime. But also it never seemed to accidentally trigger.