The Timeline of Virtual Assistants

In the past, only a few privileged individuals had the chance of employing a personal assistant to help them out with their personal and professional commitments. However, with the gradual evolution of technology, millennials now have the opportunity of grabbing a virtual assistant to serve them.

In fact, Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA) or Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) are powered by trailblazing AI solutions and their utilities are even beyond what someone can really expect. Nonetheless, similar to any other technology, virtual assistants even had undergone a gradual evolution in order to reach their present stage of development. So, from today’s blog, we thought of sharing the fascinating evolutionary journey of Virtual Assistants with you!

You may know that Intelligent Virtual Assistants at present can perform a variety of tasks starting from answering business queries, responding to voice commands as well as sending text messages and setting up phone call reminders. However, it would have been a flight of fancy for virtual assistants to perform all these tasks, if researchers couldn’t set up them in a way to understand human to machine communication.

In fact, the first ever communication in between humans and machines took place in 1966, when MIT professor Joseph weizenbaum developed an NLP based computer program called ELIZA. This was just a jumpstart for tech researchers to explore the potential of the very kind of technology. In fact, a few years later IBM came up with its Shoebox voice activated calculator, which was considered as a further advancement to the digital speech recognition technology existed at the time.

However, 1970s can be viewed as the golden age of voice recognition technology. In fact, the leading Tech-fraternity IBM, collaborated with Stanford Research Institute and Carnegie Mellon University to finally introduce Harpy. This was a speech recognition system, which could learn about 1000 words. Also, this device had the vocabulary of a 3-year-old toddler, that could fairly understand sentences.

Later in the 1980s, Tangora was launched by IBM as the world’s first ever voice recognizing typewriter. This typewriter was named after Albert Tangora, who had set the world record

for fastest typing. In fact, IBM’S Tangora had the ability of recognizing a relatively large vocabulary of 20000 words.

However, IBM Simon was introduced to the world in the early part of the 1990s and is credited as the world’s first ever virtual assistant. This IBM Simon was a handheld, touchscreen personal digital assistant with an array of features. Especially, the telephony features which enabled its users to make phone calls made IBM Simon a much popular product in the market. However, IBM Simon failed years later due to multiple reasons where most of them were technical constraints prevailed at the time.

Withal, the reputed conversation-based interactive agent production company colloquis (which was earlier known as ActiveBuddy and Conversagent) introduced SmarterChild in the year 2000. This was an AI-powered chat bot available on AOL instant messenger as well as on Windows Live Messenger. Even though this was totally a text-based chatbot, SmarterChild could even be used in performing a variety of functions such as playing games, conversing with users as well as for checking whether. Proving its market success, this bot was in high demand, until Apple finally released Siri as an app for iOS in 2010.

When glancing at the modern tech-market, there are plenty of virtual assistants available at various price ranges. Especially, most of them are launched by several corporate giants to suit the exigencies of a manifold customer base. For example, IBM’s Watson, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Facebook’s M, Google’s G-assistant, Yandex’s Alice are some of these world-famous Virtual assistants available for the use of millennials.

Basically, some of these virtual assistants such as Microsoft’s Cortana and Yandex’s Alice comes in the form of software. However, companies like Amazon have paced that extra mile to introduce devices such as Alexa, which is available in the tangible format. Providing a remarkable experience for their users, these Virtual Assistants are even integrated with various state-of-the-art features such as recognizing faces, identifying objects, communication with other devices & software, including the natural language processing capabilities.

However, tech-researchers are constantly deploying their efforts to further develop the potential of these virtual assistants. In fact, the user’s experience would be much more optimized with the futuristic virtual assistants equipped with high end technologies such as

Edge AI, CVT etc. So, all you need to do is to wait and see to which extent these virtual assistants could serve for the mankind in the years to come!