An AI Assistant That I Actually Want

Siri and Alexa are dumb. Alexa sets timers. Siri texts people, if I already know exactly who and what to say. Neither one can do the thing I actually want most days. Order food while I'm driving. Switch on the AC at home through the home automation app, hands-free, before I've even pulled into the driveway. I tweeted about this a month before I sat down to actually write it out.

One caveat upfront. This is about being alone in the car. I'm fine talking to a voice assistant when I'm driving by myself. I'm not fine doing it in front of other people. That's a personal bias, not a universal one, but it's exactly why most general-purpose voice apps don't work for me. They're built assuming I'll talk to my phone anywhere. I won't.

To be fair, the core driving problem is mostly solved already. I can call, send a message, play music or a podcast, and get navigation, all hands-free, and that covers most of what I actually need while my foot's on the pedal and my eyes are on the road.

the idle time nobody's using

What's left is everything I want to do the other half of a drive, stopped at a light, stuck in traffic, sitting in a parking lot waiting for someone. That's idle time, not driving time, and none of it gets used right now. I want to get the house cleaned, order food or groceries, set the temperature at home to whatever I'll want by the time I walk in, check my flight details, tweet, check my portfolio. None of that is voice-command-shaped today. It's still open the app, tap through it, one screen at a time, the exact thing a voice assistant was supposed to save me from.

what alexa and siri actually are

Voice-controlled search with a few party tricks bolted on, weather, timers, music, a text if the contact is unambiguous. Neither one can act on my behalf inside another app, and neither remembers enough about how I actually live to be useful even if it could. That's the whole problem in one line. A search bar you talk to, dressed up as an assistant.

what I actually want

Real access to every app on my phone. Real memory of my patterns. Real authority to transact. Not a narrator describing what it would do if I opened the app myself. "Order my usual," while I'm still driving, and it actually places the order instead of reading me a menu while I'm trying to keep my eyes on the road. "Turn on the AC," and it reaches into the home automation app and does it, instead of failing to find the skill and making me pull over to do it myself.

That doesn't mean one command and done. Take ordering food. I want back and forth on what actually goes into the cart, the same way I'd order from a person, not a single instruction I have to get exactly right the first time. Then a separate back and forth to actually pay, giving consent, reading out an OTP if that's what it takes to authorize the transaction. And once the order's placed, I still want to ask it things. When is this arriving? Tell the delivery person to leave it at the door. All of that is one continuous conversation about one job, not five separate trips into five separate apps.

Everyone's trying to make these assistants better at talking, more natural, more conversational, less robotic. That's not what I actually need. I don't need small talk. I need a real conversation about the job, start to finish, and then the job actually done. The real measure of a good assistant isn't how smart the conversation sounds, it's how few steps happen between me saying something out loud and that thing actually getting done.

why this doesn't exist yet

This isn't a technology problem anymore. The AI is already smart enough to understand what I'm asking for. The real problem is figuring out who's responsible when it gets something wrong. If an AI plans a fake trip just to practice and gets it wrong, nothing bad happens; no real flight got booked, no real money moved. But if an AI actually books my flight and charges my card and gets it wrong, that's real money and a real mess to clean up. Nobody has figured out yet who's responsible when that happens, or how much an AI should be trusted to do on its own before a human checks its work first.

On top of that, there's a second problem. Apple and Google control how much access any assistant gets to the other apps on your phone. They decide that, not the assistant maker. And handing some other company's assistant that much power over your phone isn't something either of them actually wants to do, because it would make their own Siri or Google Assistant matter less.

the founder I'd actually back

Not someone promising to run my whole life on day one. Someone who picks one bounded, recoverable transaction, one specific reorder, one specific bill, and builds the trust ladder around just that. Propose it, let me approve it a few times; earn full autonomy only once there's a track record. Widen the scope one transaction at a time, same pace as the trust. That's the assistant I'd actually hand my card to. That's the founder I'd actually write a check to.