Yes, before they went "machine learning" all these assistants were much closer to command lines you spoke to - you had to learn the phrases, but they'd work reliably once you did.

Now they basically never work.

I'd love something like this to run at home. Like an open weight model with a configurable command grammar that returns the most likely thing I said that matches the grammar. I've found things that are close but they have bits missing (like support for English) or aren't really open.

I think the ETA thing did work at one point.