There's a massive jump you're making here, I feel. From where we are to "computer, invent a new novel for me" there's a huge range of useful mid-points.
One level is just understanding more about human-written unstructured data to answer questions.
Another is to be better at sending commands to other humans.
Third there's linking these things up. Understanding where there are gaps in the knowledge, who might be able to fill them in and then asking them the right questions. I know there was work done in this area as part of CoSY back in 2004-2008 http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cosy/ which was followed with http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogx/
This then gets you to the level of essentially free personal assistants for a wide range of general tasks. That would be valuable to a very large number of people.
We're just starting to explore machine learning in any meaningful sense. I think the progress we've seen already bodes tremendously well for AI assistants.
>The primary bottleneck for intelligent agents is not voice recognition, it's semantic insight.
I absolutely agree. We won't see general purpose assistants in the near future, but that doesn't mean we won't see specialized assistants. Something like the desktop is a fairly constrained environment.
A lot of what you'd need to do is already being done by systems like Google search. You can type in a random term and it will often do an excellent job of finding exactly what you wanted.
Here's an example of just how good this tech is now. I forgot a name of a tv show one time and I typed in "movie with a clock and the key" into Google. Sure enough it found the show as the first result.
While we don't know how to make a general purpose AI right now, but there is a ton of work happening in that domain. I would be very surprised if we don't see a lot of progress there in the next few decades.
The AI doesn't have to be self improving, our brains aren't and we can do all the things that a digital assistant would need to do.
The primary bottleneck for intelligent agents is not voice recognition, it's semantic insight. They need to have an innate ability to learn the meaning of new things without being programmed to do so. As far as I know siri, cortana and google do not do this. Meaning must be programmed into them explicitly. That doesn't scale. Yes, they can learn new things, but they learn them slowly. You can even build advanced intelligent things like self-driving cars (with great effort) because the required level of understanding about the world is very constrained. However, you cannot scale it up to general purpose assistants because the amount of code required cannot be built in any reasonable amount of time. Until we have algorithms that create algorithms, software rewriting itself and evolving based on higher goals, we won't see the promised star-trek-level personal assistants come to fruition.
It could go either way. Let us hope you are right.