Why aren’t my IoT devices smarter, Or where is my robot helper at home?

We are surrounded by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, roughly 2.5 per human being on our planet. These do smart things like tell us when the package has been delivered to our doorstep (23% of us in the US own video doorbells) or telling us while cooking, for the n-th time, how many ounces is one cup (more than half of US households has a smart speaker or display). Robots do sci-fi acts, though mostly across the barrier of a computer screen. For many technology enthusiasts, and some normal people, it has been a wait rivaling Godot as to when the things in our home and workplace would become smarter to do our bidding and robots will arrive to take over the tedium of household chores. Intel had said in 2015 that the number of smart devices will grow to 200 billion by 2020 or about 26 smart objects for every human on Earth, missing the mark by more than an order of magnitude. For years, ads have been promising us emotionally attuned robots working alongside us in unscripted real-world settings, like this Superbowl ad from GM in 2007 showing a sensitive robot trying to fit in with humans.