A virtual assistant (VA) is a software agent that can perform a range of tasks or services for a user based on user input such as commands or questions, including verbal ones. Such technologies often incorporate chatbot capabilities to simulate human conversation, such as via online chat, to facilitate interaction with their users. The interaction may be via text, graphical interface, or voice - as some virtual assistants are able to interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices.

In many cases users can ask their virtual assistants questions, control home automation devices and media playback, and manage other basic tasks such as email, to-do lists, and calendars - all with verbal commands.[1] In recent years, prominent virtual assistants for direct consumer use have included Apple's Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung's Bixby.[2] Also, companies in various industries often incorporate some kind of virtual assistant technology into their customer service or support.[3]


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In 1952, Bell Labs presented "Audrey", the Automatic Digit Recognition machine. It occupied a six- foot-high relay rack, consumed substantial power, had streams of cables and exhibited the myriad maintenance problems associated with complex vacuum-tube circuitry. It could recognize the fundamental units of speech, phonemes. It was limited to accurate recognition of digits spoken by designated talkers. It could therefore be used for voice dialing, but in most cases push-button dialing was cheaper and faster, rather than speaking the consecutive digits.[8]

Another early tool which was enabled to perform digital speech recognition was the IBM Shoebox voice-activated calculator, presented to the general public during the 1962 Seattle World's Fair after its initial market launch in 1961. This early computer, developed almost 20 years before the introduction of the first IBM Personal Computer in 1981, was able to recognize 16 spoken words and the digits 0 to 9.

This gave name to the ELIZA effect, the tendency to unconsciously assume computer behaviors are analogous to human behaviors; that is, anthropomorphisation, a phenomenon present in human interactions with virtual assistants.

The next milestone in the development of voice recognition technology was achieved in the 1970s at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with substantial support of the United States Department of Defense and its DARPA agency, funded five years of a Speech Understanding Research program, aiming to reach a minimum vocabulary of 1,000 words. Companies and academia including IBM, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Stanford Research Institute took part in the program.

In 1986 Tangora was an upgrade of the Shoebox, it was a voice recognizing typewriter. Named after the world's fastest typist at the time, it had a vocabulary of 20,000 words and used prediction to decide the most likely result based on what was said in the past. IBM's approach was based on a hidden Markov model, which adds statistics to digital signal processing techniques. The method makes it possible to predict the most likely phonemes to follow a given phoneme. Still each speaker had to individually train the typewriter to recognize his or her voice, and pause between each word.

In the 1990s, digital speech recognition technology became a feature of the personal computer with IBM, Philips and Lernout & Hauspie fighting for customers. Much later the market launch of the first smartphone IBM Simon in 1994 laid the foundation for smart virtual assistants as we know them today.[citation needed]

The first modern digital virtual assistant installed on a smartphone was Siri, which was introduced as a feature of the iPhone 4S on 4 October 2011.[12] Apple Inc. developed Siri following the 2010 acquisition of Siri Inc., a spin-off of SRI International, which is a research institute financed by DARPA and the United States Department of Defense.[13] Its aim was to aid in tasks such as sending a text message, making phone calls, checking the weather or setting up an alarm. Over time, it has developed to provide restaurant recommendations, search the internet, and provide driving directions.[citation needed]

While ChatGPT and other generalized chatbots based on the latest generative AI are capable of performing various tasks associated with virtual assistants, there are also more specialized forms of such technology that are designed to target more specific situations or needs.[16][4]

Virtual assistants use natural language processing (NLP) to match user text or voice input to executable commands. Some continually learn using artificial intelligence techniques including machine learning and ambient intelligence.

Conversational commerce is e-commerce via various means of messaging, including via voice assistants[31] but also live chat on e-commerce Web sites, live chat on messaging applications such as WeChat, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp[32] and chatbots on messaging applications or Web sites.

Virtual assistants have a variety of privacy concerns associated with them. Features such as activation by voice pose a threat, as such features requires the device to always be listening.[33] Modes of privacy such as the virtual security button have been proposed to create a multilayer authentication for virtual assistants.[34]

The privacy policy of Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa, states that it only listens to conversations when its wake word (like Alexa, Amazon, Echo) is used. It starts recording the conversation after the call of a wake word, and stops recording after 8 seconds of silence. It sends the recorded conversation to the cloud. It is possible to delete the recording from the cloud by visiting 'Alexa Privacy' in 'Alexa'.[36]

This artificial intelligence is trained via neural networks, which require a huge amount of labelled data. However, this data needs to be labelled through a human process, which explains the rise of microwork in the last decade. That is, remotely using some people worldwide doing some repetitive and very simple tasks for a few cents, such as listening to virtual assistant speech data, and writing down what was said. Microwork has been criticized for the job insecurity it causes, and for the total lack of regulation: The average salary was 1,38 dollar/hour in 2010,[43] and it provides neither healthcare nor retirement benefits, sick pay, minimum wage. Hence, virtual assistants and their designers are controversial for spurring job insecurity, and the AIs they propose are still human in the way that they would be impossible without the microwork of millions of human workers.[42]

Privacy concerns are raised by the fact that voice commands are available to the providers of virtual assistants in unencrypted form, and can thus be shared with third parties and be processed in an unauthorized or unexpected manner.[44] Additionally to the linguistic content of recorded speech, a user's manner of expression and voice characteristics can implicitly contain information about his or her biometric identity, personality traits, body shape, physical and mental health condition, sex, gender, moods and emotions, socioeconomic status and geographical origin.[45]

Virtual assistants should not be only seen as a gadget for individuals, as they could have a real economic utility for enterprises. As an example, a virtual assistant can take the role of an always available assistant with an encyclopedic knowledge. And which can organize meetings, check inventories, verify informations. Virtual assistants are all the more important that their integration in small and middle-sized enterprises often consists in an easy first step through the more global adaptation and use of Internet of Things (IoT). Indeed, IoT technologies are first perceived by small and medium-sized enterprises as technologies of critical importance, but too complicated, risky or costly to be used.[54]

In May 2018, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, published a paper that showed audio commands undetectable for the human ear could be directly embedded into music or spoken text, thereby manipulating virtual assistants into performing certain actions without the user taking note of it.[55] The researchers made small changes to audio files, which cancelled out the sound patterns that speech recognition systems are meant to detect. These were replaced with sounds that would be interpreted differently by the system and command it to dial phone numbers, open websites or even transfer money.[55] The possibility of this has been known since 2016,[55] and affects devices from Apple, Amazon and Google.[56]

In addition to unintentional actions and voice recording, another security and privacy risk associated with intelligent virtual assistants is malicious voice commands: An attacker who impersonates a user and issues malicious voice commands to, for example, unlock a smart door to gain unauthorized entry to a home or garage or order items online without the user's knowledge. Although some IVAs provide a voice-training feature to prevent such impersonation, it can be difficult for the system to distinguish between similar voices. Thus, a malicious person who is able to access an IVA-enabled device might be able to fool the system into thinking that they are the real owner and carry out criminal or mischievous acts.[57]

You can communicate with the voice assistance feature found on your phone from your watch however the feature cannot be used to change device settings or start timed activities on your watch. Communication is limited to audible responses and commands and will not display visual information on the watch.

If you have switched to using Google Assistant on your Samsung smartphone, but using the voice assistant feature on your watch launches Bixby, use the following steps to allow Google Assistant to set up properly:

Voice assistants, or virtual assistants, are more than just the cool, often-female voices that respond to your verbal requests to play a song or check the weather: They are the point of communication between you and all your connected devices. But whether your voice assistant is the hub of your smart home, or simply a smartphone-based helper that tells you if it's raining, the best assistants streamline your relationship with technology. 17dc91bb1f

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