Analyzing Determinants for Adoption of Intelligent Personal Assistant: An Empirical Study

With the accelerating advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the rising demand for the intelligent personal assistant is expected to rapidly increase in the following decades. As customer loyalty has become a critical element in gaining a competitive advantage and many marketers pay great attention to it, this research aims to explore the factors that directly affect customer loyalty toward the intelligent personal assistant. The main motivation is to investigate and identify the direct effects that variables such as customer innovativeness and perceived value have on customer loyalty. Additionally, both product knowledge and corporate image will be examined as moderators. The results obtained demonstrate that perceived value has a positive influence on customer loyalty. Furthermore, product knowledge moderates the influence of functional and hedonic innovativeness on customer satisfaction. The study’s main contributions provide a better understanding of customer loyalty. This research aims to be viewed as a specific guide to provide effective practices that companies should implement to help them reallocate resources appropriately and enhance customer value creation. The results indicate that the higher the level of customer perceived value, the better the customer loyalty will be. The findings represent that corporate image has a positive moderating effect on the influence of customer innovativeness on perceived value. This study draws on the outcomes of administrative suggestions and recommends a few observational strategies to improve the monetary administration in the intelligent personal assistant industry.

Tashi-Bot: A Intelligent Personal Assistant for Users in an Educational Institution

The number of AI applications in education is growing every day. One recent AI application in the educational sector is Chatbot technology, which is used to support teaching and administrative tasks. This document presents the design and implementation of a Chatbot called Tashi-Bot that helps applicants and university students to obtain information from an educational institution about certain academic and administrative processes. Among these are processes related to well-being, tuition, costs, admission, and other services. In order to design the Chatbot, an analysis of the state of the art, methodologies, and suitable tools was carried out, and a survey was conducted to discover the needs of users and their preferences in the use of a Chatbot for this specific purpose. Tashi-Bot was implemented on the SnatchBot platform and later deployed on a Telegram channel. In its evaluation, a final survey was carried out to check on the satisfaction of the users. The results suggest that Tashi-Bot could help applicants and university students to find information on academic and administrative processes with great certainty and without the need for human interaction. Tashi-Bot can be found at: https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@TashiE_Bot..

Developing a Graphical User Interface for an Artificial Intelligence-Based Voice Assistant

Artificial intelligence machineries have been extensively active in human life in recent times. Self-governing devices are enhancing their way of interacting with both human and devices. Contemporary vision in this topic can pave the way for a new process of human-machine interaction in which users will get to know how people can understand human language, adapting and communicating through it. One such tool is voice assistant, which can be incorporated into many other brilliant devices. In this article, the voice assistant will receive the audio from the microphone and then convert that into text, later with the help of ‘pyttsx3', and then the text response will be converted into an audio file; then the audio file will be played. The audio is processed using the voice user interface (VUI). This article develops a functional intelligent personal assistant (IPA) and integrates it with a graphical user interface that can perform mental tasks such as ON/OFF of smart applications based on the user commands.

A Cognitive Personal Assistant System to Enhance the Individual-Centric Research Capabilities

The intelligent personal assistant system is designed to support the individual researchers to enhance their quality of the research through the natural language interface. Specifically, this system automatically provides intrinsic details about the importance of the topic of discussion using the timeline analysis. The results generated by the system help the researchers to understand the preference of the global researchers in the specific research field. This system primarily identifies the core topic of the discussion from the user's presentation. Further, the importance of the topic is calculated based on the research articles published over three decades in the related field. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method accurately identifies whether the research topic the user presented is HOT.

Development and Feasibility of a Family-Based Health Behavior Intervention Using Intelligent Personal Assistants: Randomized Controlled Trial

Background Intelligent personal assistants such as Amazon Echo and Google Home have become increasingly integrated into the home setting and, therefore, may facilitate behavior change via novel interactions or as an adjunct to conventional interventions. However, little is currently known about their potential role in this context. Objective This feasibility study aims to develop the Intelligent Personal Assistant Project (IPAP) and assess the acceptability and feasibility of this technology for promoting and maintaining physical activity and other health-related behaviors in both parents and children. Methods This pilot feasibility study was conducted in 2 phases. For phase 1, families who were attending a community-based weight management project were invited to participate, whereas phase 2 recruited families not currently receiving any additional intervention. Families were randomly allocated to either the intervention group (received a smart speaker for use in the family home) or the control group. The IPAP intervention aimed to promote positive health behaviors in the family setting through utilization of the functions of a smart speaker and its linked intelligent personal assistant. Data were collected on recruitment, retention, outcome measures, intervention acceptability, device interactions, and usage. Results In total, 26 families with at least one child aged 5 to 12 years were recruited, with 23 families retained at follow-up. Across phase 1 of the intervention, families interacted with the intelligent personal assistant a total of 65 times. Although device interactions across phase 2 of the intervention were much higher (312 times), only 10.9% (34/312) of interactions were coded as relevant (related to diet, physical activity or well-being). Focus groups highlighted that the families found the devices acceptable and easy to use and felt that the prompts or reminders were useful in prompting healthier behaviors. Some further intervention refinements in relation to the timing of prompts and integrating feedback alongside the devices were suggested by families. Conclusions Using intelligent personal assistants to deliver health-related messages and information within the home is feasible, with high levels of engagement reported by participating families. This novel feasibility study highlights important methodological considerations that should inform future trials testing the effectiveness of intelligent personal assistants in promoting positive health-related behaviors. Trial Registration ISRCTN Registry ISRCTN16792534; http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN16792534

Smart objects in daily life: Tackling the rise of new life forms in a semiotic perspective*

Our everyday life is increasingly permeated with digital objects that carry out smart and complex functions. The latest (but certainly not final) advancement of smart digital applications – is to be identified the creation of a field, at once conceptual and material, of things denominated smart objects (henceforth SOs). This technological evolution is so pervasive that it is referred to as smartification. Smart objects have some distinctive features including in particular varying degrees of agency, autonomy and authority. There is no doubt that the SO category is extremely broad, various and intrinsically fuzzy, it is evident that the phenomenon is by no means easy to define: which objects are really smart and which are not? But above all: what do we mean in semio-linguistic, and not psychological nor merely phenomenological terms, when we attribute the qualifier smart to an artifact? What is clear is that a new, or at least different (and controversial) relationship is developing between objects and subjects, or rather between human beings and objects inhabiting the spaces of social action: that is, a new system of objects, to cite Baudrillard (1968), or a new “society of objects” (see Landowski and Marrone 2002). In this paper we will focus on a type of smart physical device designed to interact with its users in the domestic sphere, assisting them in a variety of tasks – such as for example Amazon Echo, capable of connecting to Alexa, an intelligent personal assistant based on machine learning, or the more recent Google Assistant. Our semiotic-oriented – or, more precisely, potentially socio-semiotic/ethno-semiotic – analysis will deal with these issues theoretically by concentrating on the problem of identity, which is anthropologically, but also and above all philosophically, sensitive. We shall look at the impact of technological devices on the perceptive/cognitive systems of human beings, starting with a reflection on the practices of interaction, signification and interpretation that also involve digital objects with a possible impact on everyday life.