i sure hope so because Siri has gotten worse in the last 2 years, commands i used to use daily now fail saying it can't do that and then i try it on a different device, same prompt and it works. I do not understand why Siri works sometimes and just fails others. The HomePod Siri is especially bad now that I actually turned Siri off so my phone or watch would handle the request because they failed so often.

This is by design. All the tech giants realized search-by-speech is mostly unprofitable compared to search-by-type because you can't really sell ads auraly compared to visually. Every search done by speech is lost ad revenue. Expect to see less and less search by voice over the coming years

Something very weird is going on with the voice interfaces as I keep hearing this about each of the different assistants.

My experience is of Siri being, if anything, slightly better than a few years back; conversely, half the time Alexa would respond to me saying "Küche hundert prozent" with "Ich kann nicht Küche auf Spotify finden" and we don't even have Spotify.

From a user's perspective, they haven't shown much evidence of building new, competitive capabilities for years. Sometimes it feels like Siri has actually become less useful.

Unlikely. Apple management has been awful about this space in regards to Siri. Zero accountability at the Vp level. This should be a cakewalk for Apple, and yet here we are. Their implementation should be leveraging their hardware and Johny Srouji can implement enhancements to the neural engine & GPU to drive their LLM and establish a personal, privacy focused AI assistant.