1. In bed, all ready to fall asleep, you get up to get your notebook from your desk to add the reminder to your notebook.
2. Cooking with hands all messy, you wash your hands, dry them, go to your desk to add the reminder to your notebook.
3. Driving at 40mph, so you pull over in a parking lot, take out your notebook from your bag and add the reminder.
Yeah, I will take telling Google assistant to do this instead.
Human memory is terrible and should be relied upon as infrequently as possible.
2. Don't get so messy when cooking, also it hardly matters if your temporary notebook gets a bit dirty.
3. Don't multitask when driving. Taking your eyes off the road is the main concern, but testing has shown driver's voice control systems to be distracting to a significant degree. And, voice assistants are at least somewhat similar.
A todo entry or flipping lights via assistants also qualify as such tasks, if we broaden the definition of "easy". The flow from having the thought of an idea or a song to making a note or playing the song by just speaking out loud is just so convenient, without having to context switch from whatever one is doing. Controlling a set of IoT devices with custom commands is another good usecase.
Of course, not everyone has a workflow where a digital assistant fits well today. However, I expect that their usefulness will increase exponentially with time. We're surely heading to the sci-fi future where each house will have a personalized digital guardian responding to the wishes of the family, Jarvis style, no?
I'm believe the most valid use of AI/ML is to perform tasks that people either cannot currently do, or cannot easily do. For example, ai-based up-scaling of old video game pre-renders. It's not really feasible for a person to do this well, unless you simply rebuild everything with a team of artists. And you could argue that up-scaling images for a video game is trivial, since all video games are trivial. But, the point is that the task at hand requires the help of a computer, whereas a to-do list, or using a light switch does not.