“As it stands today, we’re not ready yet to tell people that our voice assistant is a replacement for Google/Amazon,” Schoutsen wrote. “We don’t have to be as good as their systems, but there is a certain bar of usable that we haven’t reached yet.”

Key among the improvements that need to happen, according to Schoutsen:

• Audio input needs to be cleaned up (speaker voice separated) before it is processed
• Error messages need to be more clear about what’s going wrong, and input has to have more flexibility
• Non-English languages need a lot of commands and variables
• Compatible hardware that features far-listening microphones has to be more widely available
• Most people will want local processing to be faster