The scope was just way too large. Think about it. You could ask M for anything. How many services do you use or pull data from on a day to day basis? Now how many of them have an API?

Until nearly everything has a publicly accessible API I don’t see how something like M could ever happen without extensive human interaction. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately. I pull information from a few intranet sites routinely for managing travel for my job. It’s almost exclusively online and because of the scattered sites it can be annoying to manage at times. It’s perfect for automation and an AI assistant but without any kind of programmable interface how would an AI assistant ever work with the sites?

I think Alexa and Google Assistant ultimately have the right idea, privacy issues aside. Start with a small enough scope and attract so many users that eventually services are compelled to support the devices. Over time the scope covers almost everything.