A big step towards making devices like Alexa or Siri (or more likely Google Assistant, given that this research comes from DeepMind) better understand humans is the development of "theory of mind". By around 4 years old, human children can understand that their beliefs may diverge from those of others, and that understanding that divergence can help predict likely future behaviour of others – applying this to human interaction might make the experience more natural. A first step, DeepMind's algorithm is able to analyse the behaviour of AI systems which are otherwise too complex for people to understand and to try to predict their behaviour.
https://rob.al/2vzSL7D
Algorithms achieve a machine theory of mind