Intelligent Personal Assistants
List of Intelligent Personal Assistants entries:
Intelligent personal assistants, also called virtual assistants, is software that can assist the user with tasks, planning, or retrieving information similarly to a human assistant. This software usually fully utilizes the sensors present on the device it runs on for contextual awareness. This way it can deliver more accurate and relevant information. Modern intelligent personal assistants are able to learn based on previous input so they can offer better, more personalized results to the user.
Personal assistants that are for the general consumer are, for example, the Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, or Google Now. Advanced AIs that can also be utilized as intelligent personal assistants in some applications include for example the IBM Watson.
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Main Characteristics
These assistants usually take a form of an app that acts as an interface for the user. Through this interface, the user can either by voice or by text issues queries and commands to the assistant software. The user-end interface is able to understand natural language, retrieve relevant information from it, and pass the now parsed query to a server on which the actual assistant software runs. The query is processed and appropriate information is retrieved, or action undertaken, and the result is sent back to the user interface where it is displayed by text and, often, read aloud using speech synthesis.
This software is usually found on personal, hand-held devices, mainly smartphones. The assistant then can be available at any time, provided there is connection to the Internet, as no processing is actually done on the device itself. However, applications in other forms are available, e.g. voice commanded Amazon Echo that has some features of an intelligent personal assistant.
Purpose
Intelligent personal assistants is a software that can assist the user in his daily activities, navigation, information retrieval and organization.
