Totally agree. With Siri, Google Now and Cortana soon controlling most devices, we are in desperate need of a FOSS AI assistant, one that "thinks" outside of the "corporate AI scheme". BTW that would also benefit those using GNU/Linux, *BSD, and Unices - where the corporate AI's will probably never land anyway.
I'm a bit more pessimistic. I've tried Siri and Google Now but they just seem to be more involved, less accurate ways to do things I could have done by touch. A good (human) personal assistant should know what I want and execute without involvement on my part, and that requires social cues that are difficult to encode as inputs to machine learning. Until we reach that point all we have is are speech-to-text engines with some services attached, which is not that useful imo.
This used to be absolutely true but is now only mostly true. Setting reminders by saying "Google, remind me to do X at 3pm tomorrow" like you would to a normal person works now much better than aiming at a calendar.
Same with quick searches. It's easier to do a voice search than type the terms on a phone, even with suggestions from your keyboard and Google.
