Emerging Opportunities and Challenges in Optimal Aging with Virtual Personal Assistants

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most game-changing yet controversial scientific endeavors of our lifetime. We have already created AIs capable of learning and applying intelligence to a wide variety of tasks in the physical, virtual, and social realms for rapid decision-making in financial, medical, recreational, and transportation systems (Chaboud, Hjalmarsson, & Vega, 2015). Yet none of these come as close to our homes and families as the recently introduced conversational virtual intelligent assistants. Replacing the keyboard, the tablet, and the smartphone screen to connect to the Internet by speaking instead of typing, voice commands are building increased access for these technologies among disabled adults and the rapidly increasing aging population. Known as voice activated personal assistants (VAPAs), devices like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Now are the next-generation technology going beyond Apple’s Siri, already ubiquitously found on the smartphone and iPad devices. Interactions with VAPAs are ever more tailored, more personalized, and friendlier due to the improvements in AI, as we talk to rather than through our phones, computers, tablets, and appliances.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.