All major mobile operating systems have digital personalities, such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Now. However these are not true virtual personal assistants, as they can only preform simple tasks such as scheduling appointments, setting reminders, looking things up on the internet, and a few other simple tasks. They have limited capabilities, and struggle to understand things that humans would have no problem with. Maluuba, an artificial intelligence company based in Canada has partnered with artificial intelligence researcher Yoshua Bengio. In order for machines to interact better with humans, they are looking to train networks on stories written by humans, starting with children's stories, rather than documents found on the web. By tracking the characters narratives, they are hoping the system will be able to know more about what the user wants, allowing it to be more effective. This could mean your phone using GPS data to know that you like to go to the grocery store before the bank, so it could automatically bring up your shopping list or a recipe, or bringing up something work related because of an email you received the previous day, as it now understands the flow of your day.
Other researchers and developers are looking to create a whole team of digital experts as you would in real-life scenarios, rather than making the current virtual assistants better. They could be bankers, financial planners, personal shoppers, etc., and the companies creating these fleets of bots call them virtual personal specialists. Sentient Technologies is one such company, and they have already put one such bot out into the field on Shoes.com, which helps people buy shoes. The site uses an algorithm that uses the costumer's choices to suggest products that they may want. Mark Zuckerberg has announced that it is his personal goal to build his own true virtual assistant this year.
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