[magic_smoke_ee]

Siri, the app Apple acquired from a promising Palo Alto startup once upon a time, for close-ended, fixed phrase commands hasn't changed that much for accomplishing Apple-specific tasks. However, yes, going out to the interwebs or answering open-ended questions is more problematic now than it used to be.

Amazon's Echo has also enshitified such that many skills don't work and command phrases that used to work no longer give the same results. I used to be able to ask Echo "What's the IMDB rating for [movie name]?" but it invariably gives an unrelated or a wrong answer or does a HAL-9000.

It seems like an obvious category killer app to have an AI personal assistant able to perform free-form queries and operate on allowed services with a degree of trust and care so that it can't email everyone you've ever known a photo without a high level of interactive confirmation.