Re: [voiceinteraction] names for assistants

Would conversational agent be a possible choice?

Bev
________________________________
From: Dirk Schnelle-Walka <dirk@switch-consulting.de>
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2024 9:21 AM
To: public-voiceinteraction@w3.org <public-voiceinteraction@w3.org>
Subject: Re: [voiceinteraction] names for assistants


Dear all,

as we are part of the voice interaction community group, "conversational assistant" would be a natural choice. However, I would be in favor of "digital assistant" as I agree to Noreen that this is the most generic term and includes all others.

I would not tend to go via the terms "Conversational AI" or "Conversational Intelligence" as our architecture is not limited to Generative AI systems but also cover traditional NLU based systems. We may however add a section to detail the relationship to these terms in the beginning of our draft.

Dirk

On 26/09/2024 15:08, Noreen Whysel wrote:
Have you considered Digital Assistant or Conversational Agent

Digital Assistant is the most generic and encompasses cloud and non-AI assistants. And it doesn’t confuse virtual (human) assistants with virtual (digital) assistants which tend to be limited to making appointments or If This/Then That type of processes the To me Intelligent implies it has AI at its core. And it does call to mind the old Handspring PDAs that didn’t connect to the cloud.

Conversational Agent: Here’s the Wikipedia article on Dialogue Systems, which refers to them interchangeably as Conversational Agents, which would be my preferred term since it’s less jargony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_system (“…a computer system intended to converse with a human. Dialogue systems employed one or more of text, speech, graphics, haptics, gestures, and other modes for communication on both the input and output channel“)

Drawback: The CX industry has adopted Conversational AI and Conversational Intelligence as ways to provide customer assistance and analyze past conversations. In that case, Intelligent/Intelligence refers to learning from customers to provide streamlined services (worker efficiency) or to identify trends in language and needs (VOC, or voice of the customer). Even they have to explain the difference between the technologies. There are only so many words.

Noreen

On Sep 25, 2024, at 11:41 AM, Deborah Dahl <Dahl@conversational-technologies.com><mailto:Dahl@conversational-technologies.com> wrote:

Gerard and I talked today about names that we could use instead of "personal assistant" that better reflect the technology we've
been talking about.
We wanted to rule out "personal assistant" because that doesn't apply to generic cloud assistants, which aren't personal. We also
wanted to rule out "virtual assistant" because, as Noreen pointed out, it is often used for human assistants
(https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-voiceinteraction/2024Sep/0005.html)
Some of the other possibilities were listed by Gerard in his email
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-voiceinteraction/2024Sep/0006.html.

The one Gerard and I liked the best was "conversational assistant" .
Opinions?