I think the developers want these AI tools to be likable a heck of a lot more than they want them to be useful--and as a marketing strategy, that's exactly the right approach.

Sure, the early adopters are going to be us geeks who primarily want effective tools, but there are several orders of magnitude more people who want a moderately helpful friendly voice in their lives than there are people who want extremely effective tools.

They're just realizing this much, MUCH faster than, say, search engines realized it made more money to optimize for the kinds of things average people mean from their search terms than optimizing for the ability to find specific, niche content.