Alexa to Siri, how virtual assistants are becoming our digital companions

Intelligent chatbots are computer programmed software that imitate human conversation - spoken or written - powered by technologies such as AI, natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning

Intelligent chatbots (often called intelligent virtual personal assistants) are computer programmed software that imitate human conversation — spoken or written — powered by technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning .

Origin

The origin of the concept goes back to 1911, when Radio Rex, the first voice- activated toy was released, and many years after that in 1962 IBM released IBM Shoebox which was able to perform mathematical functions as  recognise speech. However, the launch of smartphone IBM Simon laid the foundation of smart virtual assistants that we know today. But the first modern digital virtual assistant for smartphones was unveiled in 2011 when Apple introduced ‘Siri’ in its iPhone 4S.

Chatbot

The term chatbot comes from “chatterbot”, a name coined in 1994 by Michael Mauldin, who created Julia, the first chatbot made with Verbot, a popular software programme.

Progress

The technology has made significant progress since then as the intelligent virtual assistants we see today have immensely leveraged the natural language processing (NLP) to understand human language, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) to be able to think and act/ behave like humans.

Rapid adoption
 

Over last 10 years, technology majors like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, have made tremendous advancements in this area. Assistants are everywhere —from car infotainment systems to  e-commerce  sites. A bot usually is the first to reply to a customer query on food ordering platform Swiggy, while 90 per cent of banks use chatbot for customer service.