Development of the Personal Ai Assistant

The two crucial requirements that enable the existence f the digital servant

are, on the one hand, the linking of different services to a huge network and,

on the other hand, the learning aptitude of the assistant. For a digital assistant

to be able to answer enquiries, it is essential for various programs, apps and

other services to be able to communicate with each other. In order to be able to book a taxi with Apple’s Siri, for example, the operating system must allow

access to services such as Uber, which was ultimately realised in iOS10.

In the official demonstration of Viv, Dag AIttlaus provides an insight into

the huge network of categories and subcategories for different services and

information that is behind the future personal assistant. With an adaptive

assistant, even needs can be predicted after some time. The digital butler is

thus personalised so that products can be suggested, for example, that are a

perfect match to the user’s needs.

The development process of personal assistants has been divided by

research institutes and observers into different yet similar categories. The

research institute Gartner, for example, calls the development from the simple smartphone to the perfectly personalised butler as cognisant computing

(Gartner 2013). They have subdivided the process into the four steps Sync

Me, See Me, Know Me and Be Me. Sync Me implies that copies of all relevant content is stored in one place and can be synchronised with all used end

devices. This has already been realised in the course of cloud computing, to

be more precise, since it has been possible to store backup copies of telephone

and computer data in so-called clouds. The second step See Me assumes that

the algorithm knows where we are and where we were in the past, both on

the Internet and in the real world. This is also integrated in the use of smartphones and computers to a large extent. The third step Know Me is currently

being implemented with the first personal assistants as well as with services

such Netflix and Spotify, which are meant to understand what the user wants

and to suggest matching products and services (films and music in this case)

accordingly. Be Me is currently a scenario of the future in the main part, in

which the butler acts on behalf of the user according to both learned and

explicit rules. If the assistant independently improves itself, the answer and

recommendation mechanism can be finetuned further. Amazon’s Alexa, for

example, can get to know the user’s needs better and better and tries to adapt

itself to them. Via the Alexa Skills developer platform, the personal assistant

can also learn a new task as well as be connected to other companies.

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