I don't think that it'd be presumptuous of me to assume that most of you would have used an AI assistant of some sort; be it SIRI on iPhone/MacBooks, Google Now on Android, Cortana on Microsoft Windows or Alexa on Amazon Echo. Even if you used the "speak to type" option on your phone, you have used it.
Most of the AI assistants have limited functionality and do certain things quite well. I don't care if Alexa is as smart as Google Assistant. It makes up for that with an extensive skill/rule set. Google Assistant would shine in situations where the queries are more free form. SIRI/Cortana/Google Assistant/Alexa all depend on the information you are sharing with them. This inherently limits the efficacy of each. Google Express is not going to replace Amazon for my shopping needs, Microsoft Live mail is not going to replace Gmail and I'm not going to exchange my Macbook or Windows desktop for a Chromebook. So what is the solution?!
The browser wars in the 90s and early 2000s have shown us how this is going to go down. Couldn't the industry leaders pool in their resources to come up with something like a W3C standard and provide a standard browser like shim layer (Reactor/Proactor design patterns) to dispatch requests to individual subsystems (AI assistants)? This could be a simple rule engine in the first phase, that punts my email queries to Google Assistant, my shopping inquiries to Alexa, and my file related queries to Siri/Cortana etc.
Taking the browser parlance a bit far, I would want to theme my AI assistants too. I don't want to call them Google/Cortana/Alexa, I want to call them Mr Chekov or Mr Sulu and I want them to refer to me as Captain and always with a sense of impending doom (Star Trek joke for the uninitiated).
A unified AI assistant might just be a pipe dream. Hopefully, it doesn't take the AI assistants a decade to mature (like it did for the browsers).
