Also, it might be possible to create a much better assistant today, but it would be too expensive to offer to the public for free. What if it requires 100 TPUs to run?
The other main mistake was (despite it getting the conversational part right) thinking "the day after" means today.
I don't think these things require TPUs or new NLP.
For example, Google Assistant doesn't play nice with YouTube. I guess it isn't in Google's interest to have a free agent software serve a free music site when the same service makes money for Amazon (Alexa). They wanted to make their agent profitable, so didn't let it be extended for free. Just my guess.
What you are seeing here is a much simpler CS problem, but much harder social problem. It is "why can't my applications talk to each other?". I really doubt it will be solved in 10 years.
1 - Humans don't have a perfect solution for it, and machines are still worse, but not that worse.
That means the end to end performance of the system is bad, and it isn't clear how to systematically fix it.
In this particular case there is the added system integration too, which is "just programming".
1. There is an in-built assumption I am always where I currently am. This part isn't anything to do with the NLP.
2. "the day after" is translated to "today", possibly. [edit - see lower, it is in only one case]
3. This is more of an NLP one, it understands that the context of "weather" carries from one question to the next, but not the timing. So asking for the weather tomorrow and then "one day later" gets tomorrows as well. [edit - more complex than this, it's actually working in some areas and not in others]
I'd like to see what user-stories it's trying to solve, because apart from setting timers and alarms it's been massively hit and miss for me.
I tried to repeat what I'd put in and this time I had:
"What's the weather the day after" - translated to tomorrow, with no context, that makes sense.
"What's the weather today?" - weather today, followed by "What about the day after?" which gave me results about the film.
"What's the weather tomorrow?" - weather tomorrow, followed by "what about the day after?" which then worked.
So it works just fine for "weather" but not for asking if I need to take an umbrella. And it doesn't work if I ask for today then the day after, but does for tomorrow and the day after.
Why does the context get passed on for the day correctly for "tomorrow" but not for "today"? Why can it get that "the day after" means tomorrow, unless I've asked about an umbrella in which case it means today? At the core of my question is how is it this inconsistent?
What tests have they got around this?