I’ve been an early adopter of Google’s smart home ecosystem, using their devices and assistants since the very first iteration. But it’s safe to say that for the longest time, the promise of a digital assistant has been stuck in a cycle of setting kitchen timers and reading out the weather. Google Assistant, Siri, and even the newer Gemini integrations are essentially voice-activated search engines with a few smart home toggles attached. They operate within a very specific, very safe sandbox. While agentic control of your smartphone seems to be the future — and despite experimental projects like the Rabbit R1 attempting to bridge that gap — we haven’t quite seen a truly seamless implementation come to fruition just yet.
For years, the promise of a digital assistant has boiled down to kitchen timers and weather updates.
This frustration isn’t limited to mobile devices. Even in a desktop environment, these assistants quickly reach their limits. If you want to move a file from your downloads folder to a specific project directory based on its contents, or if you want to scrape a website and format that data into a local spreadsheet, these assistants simply hit a wall. They don’t have the permissions, and frankly, the companies building them don’t want to deal with the liability of giving an AI that kind of control and reach.