For a long time, there have been a lot of predictions made by science fiction authors and movie makers on how widespread Artificial Intelligence could cause severe catastrophic issues. But, so far everything’s good and instead of sending any negative signs, somehow they have become an integral part of our daily lives. Thanks to the Intelligent Personal Assistants in our smart phones, we can carry their services with us everywhere. Here in this article we take you through the science behind these Intelligent Personal Assistants and a whole lot more.

What is an Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA)?

An Intelligent Personal Assistant is a AI-based software agent that can perform tasks completely based on the user input. The special charm of this technology is that it is built with the ability to access online resources in processing user commands. These online resources can be as simple as the weather conditions, news, retail prices etc. There are a lot of these IPAs in the market including the IBM’s Watson, Samsung’s S Voice, Apple‘s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Now and so on.

The additional ground breaking feature in these Intelligent Personal Assistants is that they don’t completely relay on user’s input. Some activities like management of tasks, updating information without user’s permission are all handled effectively by an IPA.

Actually speaking, these Intelligent Personal Assistants in real time deliver only a very small fraction of what they are build to do. The development of an IPA solely focuses on providing a user interactive system which can actually converse with people. The fact that these solutions can understand our languages and are active to learn more, and get better with time are all the plus points of this technology.

An IPA is a combination of technological breakthroughs in voice recognition, natural language processing, machine learning, web semantics with Artificial Intelligence (AI) giving rise to a whole new innovative remake of the now obsolete PDA (Personal Digital Assistants).

The Most Popular IPAs in the Market

• Siri

Siri is that application on Apple’s IOS-IPhone and IPad which gets activated on our natural language commands and performs a set task. It has this well crafted interface with which it can answer all user’s commands. It is only built for the Apple family and an IOS-IPhone or an IPad is a must to check out this IPA. All it has to hear to get started is “Let’s talk Siri”.

• Google Now

Google Now is the application of Google’s Android that can be used on any of the Android built-in tablets and smart phones.  It definitely can do a lot more stuff than Siri. Comparatively, its performance is also much better compared to Siri’s in many aspects. Though it came into the market after Apple’s Siri, Google Now could establish itself providing better features and functionality than Siri.

• Cortana

Cortana is Microsoft’s Intelligent Personal Assistant and is a part of Windows 10, set to launch sooner. Before its full level release, Cortana has already had some success in the previous versions of Windows. So, there’s nothing wrong for Windows to hold until everything is set and then products like these are always meaningful.