Ask HN: What are the challenges of building a personal assistant like Siri?

I'm thinking to build a language-specific personal assistant, like Siri or Cortana. I'm excited about the technical challenge but wondering about its feasibility.

Some of the challenges are:

1. NLP: I am not aware of any non-English library and don't have much background on the subject.

2. Voice recognition: same as the above.

3. Web crawling: there are tons of libraries for doing crawling and I have a decent understanding of the subject.

So few questions:

1. are there any other challenge that I have not considered?

2. is the project feasible?

3. will it succeed?

1. Do you know what you are doing? (not trying to be harsh... it's a serious question.)

2. Have you read any of the latest research in this area? (think Google scholar).

3. Often, apps like siri and cortana do not process the sound on the device, but rather send it to a server for processing. There is, of course, exception in cases of small, well-defined applications with limited pattern matching required.

4. Whether or not it is feasible and/or succeed is based on your ability, performance, and approach. We cannot predict any of that here.

I was one of those who wanted to build their own Jarvis. If you want it to do certain -pre-defined- tasks like opening Facebook or a website etc., it is not that hard. However, if you want to create something like Siri, you need to use almost everything humanity has in terms of AI/ML until today.

It's tricky but there are some nice ways to check the water quickly. Check out LUIS - https://www.luis.ai

It seems to me though that there is a continuum between "multi-channel interactive semi-declarative rule engine" (Frankly, the continuum probably starts back in oldschool IRC bots and expert systems) and "strong AI", wherein the bulk of the value, for me at least, is on the former side of that scale.

The vast majority of the pragmatic functionality I'd use on a day to day basis could probably be built by someone with the willingness to learn about the systems involved, no rocket science or all of humanities ML required :) (I certainly didn't know about anything from scraping to relay control to information retrieval at the start of my pet project)

I guess why I'm saying this is to address yours and some other child comments that seemed more dismissive of the idea due to the complexity (Responded to yours largely because you had gone through the steps of "try it yourself" which I see as the crux of all of this). To the op, Try it! What does it matter if it's out of your grasp. Learn new shit. Realize the extents of your knowledge, and in the process, push them a bit further. If you fail, I would be hesitant to ever call it failure if you even learned a little; I can't tell you the number of pipe dream impossible projects (microkernels, distributed OSes, rewriting AML on my own platform, etc) I've taken on, and despite failing at many of them, the learnings were well worth the time, not to mention the once in a while surprising success at someone you thought was out of your reach.