A view of personal assistants
25
Jun
Personal assistants are emerging in a variety of companies and applications: Apple’s Siri, 
Microsoft’s Cortana and Google now, Alexa´s Amazon and the less well-known environments that support many developments such as Speaktoit and DialogFlow stand out in popularity.
The voice assistant, as I prefer to call it, the Cortana now associated with Windows 10, has this name due to the character of the Halo series, with Jen Taylor, character voice actor, who lends her voice to the personal assistant (Foley, 2014).
Siri is an Apple Personal Assistant style application, ie for iOS, macOS and watchOS, so it is available for iPhone, iPad and the like. Speaktoit has something else, by a voice-activated wizard that has an avatar on the screen.
The wizard is actually a cartoon character who talks with quotations on balloons and gives you some interesting human interaction appearance.
By the end of 2014 this wizard had more than 13 million users in 11 different languages in a category of 6 applications called LifeStyle was the main application among those used by Google Play in the USA.
In September 2014, Speaktoit released the api.ai (voice enable engine that powers the wizard) to any developers, who allow both the use of avatars with the addition of voice interfaces to applications based on Android, iOS, HTML5 and Cordova.
Although discontinued in December 2016, API.ai uses its features and is integrated with dialogFlow, which can be considered with its continuity.
References:
Brandon, John. “Speaktoit Review“, Laptop magazize, 2013.
Foley, Mary Jo «Microsoft’s ‘Cortana’ alternative to Siri makes a video debut», ZDNet, 2014.
Tolentino, Mellisa “New platforms, upgrades simplify life for IoT developers“, siliconANGLE, 2014.
