Virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri and Cortana have almost fallen victim to their own hype by causing deflated expectations among many of their users. There have been signs of usage declining after an initial flurry as people come to realize that their powers of conversation are very limited, extending little beyond the ability to satisfy a list of basic requests. In some respects, they seem to be little better than rule-based expert systems. This is at odds with the great progress that has been made recently after years of slower advances in natural language processing, the ability to process written text and also spoken words, which is partly why virtual assistants were over -hyped. It was assumed, at least by…