Automated online assistant

A virtual assistant is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual. These tasks or services are based on user input, location awareness, and the ability to access information from a variety of online sources, such as weather or traffic conditions, news, stock prices, flight information, user schedules, and retail prices.

Virtual assistants make work via text, voice, (or, as in the case of Google Assistant, both); or as in the case of Samsung Bixby, by taking photos or uploading images.

They may be integrated into many types of platforms or, like Amazon Alexa, across several of them:

Chatbots and virtual assistants can provide a wide variety of services, and particularly those from Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant grow by the day. These include:

Amazon enables Alexa "skills" and Google "actions", essentially apps that run on the assistant platforms.

Chatbots are a main, but not the exclusive component of a virtual assistant. IBM's Watson is not a virtual assistant but rather an entire artificial intelligence platform powering some virtual assistants and chatbots. Virtual assistants can be distinguished from "smart personal agents", which perform ongoing tasks (e.g., schedule management) autonomously.

One of the key aspects of an intelligent personal assistant is its ability to organize and maintain information. This includes the management of emails, calendar events, files, to-do lists, etc.

A study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that Siri and similar devices often gave unhelpful responses to mental health questions.

The main function of the dialog system of automated online assistants is to translate the human-generated input into a digital format that the automated online assistant can use for further processing by its expert system, as well as interpret whatever solutions or replies it generates back to what a human user understands, and optimally in a way as natural and user-friendly as possible. A major underlying technology to such systems is natural language processing.

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Wikipedia