The reality is that even a human personal assistant can rapidly devolve to being more of a hindrance than a help if they're not very good once you get beyond simple mechanical tasks. Even with all the knowledge about the world that most adults carry around in their heads. Yes, a poor human assistant can fall down in other ways such as forgetting to do something--but they have a lot of context.

This seems a really high bar for voice assistants aspiring to do much more than set alarms or turn the odd light etc. on or off.

These days few people have personal secretaries, but back when they were common they really were personal - once you got a personal secretary she (nearly always she, I feel like we should acknowledge sexism even though it is irrelevant my point) would follow you (nearly always male), as you moved job to job and up the ladder. She went with the you because once you spent a few years training her to how you worked, a new secretary would greatly limit your effectiveness.

These days a large part of what people relied on secretaries for a computer can do faster, so only at the highest levels do you see them. There are still secretaries at the low levels, but not nearly as many, and they are not doing the same tasks.

That's pretty much it. We call them executive admins these days where they exist.

And, yeah, assistants shared with a bunch of other people--as with travel agents in general--aren't really all that useful. If I'm mostly just giving fairly mechanical instructions to execute, it's probably easier for me to go online and figure out the options myself.

A secretary made a lot more sense when you dictated memos for inter-office mail and retrieving information often involved making multiple phone calls.

If that voice assistant were self hosted in the little device, I agree. But those simple interfaces are connected directly to a significantly larger machine that literally knows everything about you and half of everyone you know. It's not unheard of to expect it to be more useful than setting timers and playing music.

They "know" a bunch of discrete facts. They don't know that if you book me on a red-eye unnecessarily to save $100 I'll be hunting you down. Or any of a zillion other flexible preferences--some of which I'm not even very consistent about.

I don't know about you personally, but google definitely knows I've never booked a red-eye and that I haven't booked a layover since the early aughts. I'm fairly sure Google could easily figure out not only where I'd be interested in flying to in the next few months, but when and for how long, and at what price points I'd consider upgrading my flight.

I know they know this about me not only because of my Gmail account but also because I use Google flights to find the flights before I book them.

Unfortunately they're not using this data to help me. Rather they're using it to target advertising to me. But they definitely have the data and the machinery to be more useful to me with more than just a few facts

Maybe my travel is more complicated but I even not infrequently get annoyed with "past me" for various travel-related decisions. I avoid red-eyes but at some price point I won't--or maybe only if it's someone else's money. And maybe I don't have a choice based on my schedule or just what flights are available. Normally I won't do an unnecessary layover but maybe I will to fly my preferred airline.

It gets complicated in a hurry and for the cases where it is relatively simple (and when it gets into very complex international travel a voice interface is going to be completely useless), I can look up my options pretty quickly on a computer.

>> This seems a really high bar for voice assistants aspiring to do much more than set alarms or turn the odd light etc. on or off.

That's kind of my point. A voice assistant is just a fancy UI until they reach the level of AGI, and I don't see the point in spending billions of dollars on them to be a simple UI as Amazon seems to be doing.