It's not all or nothing. It's not that a small implementation isn't better than a massive one. We also don't have "people" that build all these things. We have different groups.

I think some of what Facebook has done with Messenger, is far, far ahead of so many dedicated video/chat companies. VSTS, Team City, Octopus, they've done amazing work in helping us build software. Text to speech for text messaging? way beyond what I saw from Dragon and MS years ago. Siri/Google have nailed this very well in many ways. No perfectly, but great.

PII not being protected? Some companies do a great job, some do a horrible job. That's separate from an assistant that might do niche, limited services.

An assistant like Cortana doesn't mean an open mic. You could define assistant in different ways, and there is work to improve the text interaction. I tend to prefer those, but some bots can make systems much more efficient.

Be careful of getting caught up in the idea that a voice assistant means open-ended work like the Star Trek computer that does everything. I'm not convinced we'll ever get there, but niche items, I see vastly improving capabilities to help us.