A personal AI assistant. Something like Jarvis from Iron Man.

Learned pretty quickly that it is very close to impossible without the resources of the largest corporation in the world. So I've given up.

You can also take a different approach where behavior is constructed using predicate logic so you can't give instructions in natural English but it still enables you to build a model of your life, then invent a word-based syntax and hook it up to a general purpose speech recognition library.

You could also use imperative routines, I just think predicate logic is slightly closer to how we normally think.

@lbfalvy still the process of catching a ball seems far more complex than it may be.

When we see the ball, we can catch it. If there is wind, we manage to predict where the ball is coming.

@Grumm Catching a ball is a complex task that users shouldn't write programs for, in any language. Home automation should be the process of plugging pre-made stuff together to describe your own life.

@lbfalvy for home yes. But OP was talking about Jarvis like AI. The options should be more than just opening a gate or turning the radio on like Alexa already can.

@Grumm Well yes but if you know how to code you can probably consider most of the important edge cases in catching a ball, at least those relevant to your situation. Or you can specify the process of catching something in terms of a trajectory and then include wind in the process of calculating trajectories.

@Grumm I'm not suggesting a way of doing what OP wants, I'm suggesting a weaker alternative that could potentially be realized by a single dev. Obviously you can't have something that can figure out that you need to account for wind when catching a ball without someone programming either this into the system or a generalization of it such as the ability to extrapolate the near future in terms of experience. Expecting shit to just work inflates workloads to the scale of megacorporations.

@lbfalvy just programming some scripts isn't the same as a model learning to predict what you would want to do with your PC at a given time

@Grumm yes, I mean something like a secretary or personal assistant and not a glorified light switch

@iiii well yeah, if you want everything to "just work" you will need a megacorporation dedicated to your particular use case. Logic programming is the next best thing, you describe the possible atomic operations, their preconditions and effects, and the executor figures out how to achieve the desired effect.

@iiii if you had dreamt about holding millions of transistors in a single hand in the 80's, people would have called it impossible.
If you wanted to chart a truck route from London to Hong Kong in the 90s, you would need resources no company on the planet had.
If you wanted to take tens of thousands of high-res photos in the 00's, you would need a BBC worth of professional photographers and huge cameras.
And just try to imagine Netflix as it is today in 2010. no network would have such bandwidth.
So, yeah. Only huge corporations have experimental smart AI nowadays. In the future, toasters will teach dogs to pee outside (or something else unthinkable today).