>Doing it by cannibalizing how well basic "play radio/start time/read from audible" worked for the longest time, everything they do that causes friction there is frustrating, to the extreme.

Theres absolutely no reason why plugging in an LLM would break any of those features but asking generic questions would be 100x better than "Searching the web for a shitty Quora or Alexa answers question."

Pluhging in an LLM breaks it when those features require it to be worded a certain way. Agree that it shouldn't, but that seems to be the way it is often done.

For example, I tried Google's Gemini a while ago instead of Google Assistant on my phone and it was unable to do basic things like 'open the Signal app' and would instead go on a big tangent about how it can't open the Signal app for me, but that I could open the Signal app by finding it on my home screen or if I don't have it installed I can download it from the play store etc.

In principle, I agree with you. In practice, it keeps getting worse.

I also don't typically ask generic questions. Ever, that I can remember.

Again, I don't want to dislike the idea. If people are really getting value from it, I would like them to continue to do so. But it seems to be a more expensive way to service use cases that were working just fine.