Re: Different types of personal assistants

Thanks Noreen. See also [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_assistant | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_assistant ] [ https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/virtual-assistant-va | https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/virtual-assistant-va ] . 
30 years ago, we had [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant ] ! A digital assistant could take many forms : 
[ https://www.oracle.com/chatbots/what-is-a-digital-assistant/ | https://www.oracle.com/chatbots/what-is-a-digital-assistant/ ] [ https://workgrid.com/article/what-is-a-digital-assistant | https://workgrid.com/article/what-is-a-digital-assistant ] [ https://whatfix.com/blog/digital-assistant/ | https://whatfix.com/blog/digital-assistant/ ] 
[ https://peoplespheres.com/digital-assistant-a-powerful-tool-in-the-workplace/ | https://peoplespheres.com/digital-assistant-a-powerful-tool-in-the-workplace/ ] 
It looks like these terminologies may require some clarification,... 

Have a good Sunday, Gérard 
​​_____________________________________________________________________ 
Gérard CHOLLET,PhD,DR,CNRS-SAMOVAR,gerard.chollet@TELECOM-SudParis.eu 
Institut Polytechnique de Paris, IMT-TSP, 9 rue Charles Fourier, 91011 Evry 
Tel: +33 1 75319628 , http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~chollet/ 
_____________________________________________________________________ 



De: "Noreen Whysel" <nwhysel@gmail.com> 
À: "Gerard CHOLLET" <gerard.chollet@telecom-sudparis.eu> 
Cc: "Dirk Schnelle-Walka" <dirk@switch-consulting.de>, "public-voiceinteraction" <public-voiceinteraction@w3.org>, "Dijana PETROVSKA" <dijana.petrovska@telecom-sudparis.eu> 
Envoyé: Samedi 14 Septembre 2024 20:28:33 
Objet: Re: Different types of personal assistants 

Digital Assistants. 
A Virtual Assistant is a field of administrative services and is a human, whose livelihood is coincidentally threatened by the rise of digital assistants and digital agents in the same way that travel agents were threatened by Expedia and Travelocity and the like. 

Other kinds like Apple Watch and mobile phone apps can serve as digital assistants and also store personal details. Siri can store some personal information and perform scheduled tasks, so it does have some data storage. But not that good at remembering past conversations in the way AI could (and in my experience hasn’t been that good either yet. 

Noreen 



On Sep 13, 2024, at 4:02 AM, Gerard CHOLLET <gerard.chollet@telecom-sudparis.eu> wrote: 





BQ_BEGIN

Dear Colleagues, 

Please, have a look at [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_assistant | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_assistant ] 
Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Bixby,... are not 'personal assistants' according to this definition although this is common practice : 
[ https://medium.com/@alexander_clifford/a-complete-guide-on-ai-powered-personal-assistants-with-examples-2f5cd894d566 | https://medium.com/@alexander_clifford/a-complete-guide-on-ai-powered-personal-assistants-with-examples-2f5cd894d566 ] 
They are lacking a memory of previous discussions as well as personal data (which we do not want to share with them anyway,...). 
Their primary purpose may be to acquire information about you in order to send you publicity,... 
All these "assistants" could be called virtual assistants. 

All the best, Gérard 
​​_____________________________________________________________________ 
Gérard CHOLLET,PhD,DR,CNRS-SAMOVAR,gerard.chollet@TELECOM-SudParis.eu 
Institut Polytechnique de Paris, IMT-TSP, 9 rue Charles Fourier, 91011 Evry 
Tel: +33 1 75319628 , http://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/~chollet/ 
_____________________________________________________________________ 



De: "Dirk Schnelle-Walka" <dirk@switch-consulting.de> 
À: "public-voiceinteraction" <public-voiceinteraction@w3.org> 
Envoyé: Jeudi 12 Septembre 2024 15:22:00 
Objet: Different types of personal assistants 



Dear all, 

in the last session we wer discussing around the term "Intelligent Personal Assistant" and found that this might be already too specific, but that multiple variants of assistants should be out there. One aspect of it might be the way data is handled. In publications we usually see different wordings and sometimes a definition what is understood by that. A general terminology might be missing. Hence we were thinking to ask our community here to help us with that. 

So far we were discussing 

    * Personal assistant 
    * 
        * An assistant that knows you but does not represent a company, Like Siri, Google Assistant, Bixby, ... 
    * Enterprise assistant 
    * 
        * An assistant representing a company or service, like an assistant for your bank, school, neighborhood association,... 
    * Public assistant 
    * 
        * An assistant that is publicly available and does not need your data to work, like a smart city assistant 
    * Embedded assistant 
    * 
        * An assistant that has all you data locally 
    * ... 


Do you have any thought on that? Is there maybe already such a categorization available that we are not aware of? 

Dirk 

BQ_END