The new wave of digital assistants
By Rashmi Phadnis, SE EXTC
The introduction of digital assistants has ushered
in a new era of luxury. They act as genies
capturing our every word and answering our
every question. Here's everything you need to
know about them.
How have Digital Assistants evolved?
For years, science fiction tried to imagine what
digital assistants could be. The original vision
was little more than a glorified butler. Since the
digital era, we have moved away from that
model to something that is more ephemeral like
Iron Man’s Jarvis.
Our practical history with digital assistants starts
off much
more modestly with the admired Clippy , an interactive
animated character that helped users navigate Microsoft
Office. Our next encounter came from Microsoft Bob .
The simplified operating system contained a series of
“personal guides”. These digital guides helped users
navigate various operating system functions.
With the advent of mobile phones, machine learning and
deep neural networks, we are seeing much more
sophisticated assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s
Siri, Google's Google Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana and
Samsung’s Bixby.
How do these assistants work?
Digital assistants combine machine learning
technologies to provide a new way to interface our personal computing devices. Typically, digital
assistants across device platforms understand the context by understanding as much about you
as possible. This happens by accessing patterns and data from your email, tracking past GPS
location patterns, as well as past requests made to it by the user.
To top it all, digital assistants continuously learn from the millions of requests it receives
from users across the globe. Smartphone-based assistants can accept commands or questions
and translate them to text. But it is cloud-based software that figures out what the text means,
searches for answers, picks the best one and sends it back to the mobile device.
How do they make our lives easier? They can give us the latest news and weather
information. They can call up music tracks or radio stations, can be used to get an answer for