Transcription is a hard problem but it's pretty closed to solved. The unsolved problem is telling an voice assistant to do something useful and having it do it

Transcription is a hard problem but it's pretty closed to solved. The unsolved problem is telling an voice assistant to do something useful and having it do it. An AI assistant would be something that could act on "Book me a trip to Tokyo and inform the relevant people," not interacting with a spoken command line, invoking some API by voice, or laboriously filling out a form by talking to a computer.