What you’re missing is that with LLMs the chief obstacle with voice assistants changed overnight from “how do we develop a system that can easily interact in natural language” (at the time, a very hard and possibly unsolvable problem) to “how do we expose our systems to API-driven input/output” (a solvable problem that just takes time).

Case in point, I asked Siri to change my work address. She stated that I needed to use the Contacts app to do that. This is not very helpful. The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input. Siri is also probably not very good at extracting structured address information from me via natural language, but the new LLMs can do this easily.