Virtual Assistants

Virtual Assistants are artificial intelligence systems that perform human-like tasks for users, similar to a personal assistant Some of the popular virtual assistants include Apple's Siri, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Home. Many virtual assistants can carry out a number of tasks following a voice command, such as giving the weather, playing music, or controlling smart home devices.

Popular Virtual Assistants

Amazon Alexa Voice System

Often known as Alexa, the Alexa Voice System is a virtual assistant created by Amazon. It works on many different Amazon devices, such as Amazon Echo, the Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap, among other Alexa smart home devices. Upon saying the wake word, which is "Alexa" by default, the user can give a command to which the assistant will carry out.

Some of the many tasks Amazon Alexa can do are answering questions, reading headlines from your favorite news outlets, set timers and alarms, control certain smart home devices, stream music, and relay weather or traffic information. Some of the tasks that the Alexa Voice System cannot do are distinguish between different voices, send audio messages, and saying swear words. In addition to the built in functionality of Alexa, is the Smart Home Skill API which allows third-party developers to create apps called skills. By February 2017 there were 10,000 skills created for Alexa.

Google scored the highest, followed by Siri, Cortana, and lastly, Alexa. Chen found that Alexa was the best at tasks related to music and Siri was best at calendar and email tasks. Chen also found small differences amongst the four virtual assistants as Siri could read aloud email messages, compose emails, and create calendar events, while Google could not read email aloud and Alexa was unable to create calendar events or compose emails.