View from Google Assistant: Are we becoming reliant on AI?

Whilst Siri was the first mainstream voice assistant many of us became familiar with, there are many personal AI's coming onto the market to make our lives that little bit easier. Google Assistant which was initially released in 2016 is'your own personal google' - you can ask it questions, tell it to do things, and now it can even identify what song you're listening to on the radio similar to Shazam. The AI, which can be found on Google's Android phones and Google Home, is also one of the only voice assistants that hasn't been given a female name or exclusively a female voice, breaking the gender stereotypes of digital assistants being female helpers. Voice assistants historically have problems understanding users for a variety of reasons including accent, context, background noise and sentence structure, and Yariv Adan, Product Leader at Google Assistant is currently leading a team that's responsible for key pieces of the intelligence of the product, including the ability to understand context, to act proactively, to understand and respond to complex statements in natural language, to "see" using a camera, etc. There is of course an ideal intelligent assistant that everyone has in mind, and Google Assistant are trying to imagine the characteristics of this perfect AI and'come up with the baby steps we can build to get there.'