Cortana, Alexis, and the other “personalities” starting to show up on the internet and on your personal computer, are not AI. They are simply a different kind of keyboard. And they get the input wrong at least as often did your fingers with a keyboard. Speech to Text is an awesome [in the original sense] technology, and it is powerful for surveillance as well as for user input, but that’s all it is: user input. The computer does not “understand” you and so far, there is no actual technological reason to suppose a computer will ever understand what it hears; it will only ever react to what to what it hears.
When you close a switch on the wall, a light comes on. That’s all that’s happening here, just a few more steps involved. It’s a machine, folks. A machine, so far, without a ghost in it.
Real AI is yet to be invented, and there is still, so far, not even a theoretical basis for such. Our present technological base is a long way left-field from what it would take for that to happen.
There are speakers out there making money pushing the idea of a coming “technological apocalypse” where the machines are going to dispense with humans because we’re not needed any more. This is not even good science fiction, let alone science. Maybe in the 1950’s it would have been; but you wouldn’t sell it today. (The machines can not generate their own electricity, run electrical cords, plug things in, manufacture themselves, build new factories and they most certainly can not — I guarantee it — design themselves. It just ain’t gonna’ happen, not with the current technology, at least.)
(Just for the record, the author has been a technologist, computer programmer and software engineer of many sorts [among other things] for over 40 years.)