Note that one of the original developers of the virtual assistant software Wildfire went on to work on Android, and is now at Google. Remember that Wildfire was available in the 1990s, about 20 years ago, and to the best of my knowledge is still the best experience available in the in-call constant presence virtual assistant use case (a company called Virtuosity still sells it), though both Google and Apple blow it out of the water for more general use cases.<p>I don't think mobile-device-based offline voice interaction is going to be sufficiently fluid for the mass market for awhile yet, but Google certainly has the server and network effects infrastructure to make advanced, mass market voice recognition work and keep improving the experience, and use that collected data to drive algorithmic and corpus improvements in the offline module. If Apple styles itself as a leading consumer tech brand, then it will be interesting to see how they counter Google.<p>And counter they must: at the moment, voice interaction is one-on-one, but with enough algorithms and corpus, independent agency will become possible. It will be very limited at first. Something along the lines of directing the virtual assistant to call your vet's office for an appointment that works with not just your timetable, but your anticipated errand locations traversal (that is, solving a limited-case Traveling Salesman problem on the fly).