Imagine an energy efficient IC for a small multimodal model that can do voice to text, text to speech, question/answer, tool calling, and structured output.
Wire that up to a microcontroller that parses the structured output to constrain the model (rather than giving the model direct hardware access).
Now you have an assistive tech mode for supporting vision impaired users without requiring them to configure an app on their phone, pair devices, etc. And so now the user can just speak to the washing machine to tell it what to do.
And because models are getting better and better at multi-language support, you can rely on a single model to cover a wide range of spoken languages. And therefore you don't need a bunch of variants of this chip for a single product line.
TLDR this gives a path to replace "always online" and "wifi enabled" devices with fully on-device capabilities without being forced to abandon assistive technology support.