In general, I find myself using virtual assistants only for simple tasks I'd rather not fiddle with dials for -- timers, reminders. The problem is, embedding vi

In general, I find myself using virtual assistants only for simple tasks I'd rather not fiddle with dials for -- timers, reminders. The problem is, embedding virtual assistant support is another API, and there are countless others that need to be maintained as well, so it becomes just a useless kludge. I think having some sort of URI scheme would be nicer, for a more Unixy approach to things. For example, "timer/start-timer/3:00" and "settings/bluetooth?action=toggle"; but also "com.tumblr.tumblrapp/notifications" etc. That way you may be able to implement inter-app and OS APIs in a way that also exposes them automatically to being done by a user, and some on-device neural network would transform a general query into such a URI. You'd have to have some checks that actions aren't irreversible, of course. It would also help greatly neural net returned a confidence rating so the OS knows whether to do an action automatically, ask for clarity, show a list of what it thinks could help, etc. It would require a gargantuan amount of effort, unfortunately, so the current system of manually-adding features is probably here to stay for a good while.