Chatbots, digital assistants, virtual assistants are all based on a conversational user interface, and they are not all equally smart or conversational. Traditionally chatbots have been associated with conversational systems with a chat-like or messenger-type interface, while personal digital assistants in your device can translate speech to text, and do text-to-speech synthesis to read back responses to the user, and are more 'personal' in the sense that can help you do things more quickly, for instance, sending a text or setting a reminder in your calendar. Virtual Digital Assistant or Virtual Assistant is just a generic term for both. Virtual Assistants can differ in many of the steps in the following diagram, which depicts a data-flow that occurs after a user utters a question to the moment they get an answer. For instance, some Virtual Assistants are just Q&A chatbots and have a very limited dialog manager component, others may lack speech recognition or understand more than just the English language. In analyzing virtual assistants, these are some of the things they may or may not do:
I will be comparing some of the commercial virtual assistants in future posts and will use the above 10-point comparison list to highlight features or lack thereof. |
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