I believe this is happening, or will be shortly. I've had these weird experiences as well.<p>But one casual experiment is not proof. I assume the implications for battery life alone would make this impractical.
I wrote this up elsewhere, so will paste here too:<p>I suggest trying out state-of-the-art voice assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo. These devices have had enormous engineering and computer science resources thrown at them. They're able to do stuff like play a song from some artist or genre off YouTube or Spotify. Maybe. Sometimes. You'll find that even in this scenario that they have explicitly optimized for, you have to repeat yourself sometimes. I'm talking about a tiny domain here - playing music from artists - that the human is intentionally trying to hit.<p>The idea that the current state of Machine Learning can somehow take an arbitrary, open sentences like "I’m thinking about going back to uni" to lead to appropriate ad targeting for enrolling in college courses just doesn't align with the reality of Machine Learning.<p>Maybe you think you don't actually need great Machine Learning. You could just go with very rough categorizations such as...detecting the word "uni" appeared in the sentence so bucket them into the "uni" ad category for ad targeting! But then they would also bucket "I hated uni" and "oh yeah, season 2 takes place in uni" and "I'm driving past uni" all into that category. Ad targeting relevance would be diluted dramatically. Where is the financial incentive to do such terrible ad targeting?<p>tl;dr ML just isn't there yet. Also it requires monumental leaps in Machine Learning for Facebook to be financially incentivized to do this; ad targeting would suffer otherwise.