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Evolution of Tech Assistants

  • IBM Shoebox

    IBM Shoebox
    It could understand 16 words/digits. First voice assistant available to the public. Was moderately cheap.
  • Carnegie Mellon: The Harpy Program

    Carnegie Mellon: The Harpy Program
    It could understand about 1000 words. Several new heuristics were added in contrast to the IBM Shoebox. This eliminated the need for doing an acoustic match. Not just one though. For all phonemic types at every time sample
  • Dragon Dictate by Dragon

    Dragon Dictate by Dragon
    First speech recognition available to the public ($6,000). It started on Apple's platform. It was developed by Nuance Communications. Ths works online, but requires internet connection.
  • Clippy by Microsoft

    Clippy by Microsoft
    An office assistant. Clippy was often misunderstood. You either loved or hated it's soulful eyes. It could be accessed on computers, and it would pop up on screen to please or annoy you.
  • IBM Watson

    IBM Watson
    It could compete on America's show "Jeopardy". It can find answers to many questions.Watson can surprisingly be plugged into your device. We’re all tired of robotic call center menus and long wait queues. A better way is provided with Watson.
  • Siri by Apple

    Siri by Apple
    An intelligent assistant. It can do loads of things including finishing your messages, setting alarms, and calling people. It provides shortcuts to different things. Siri is always learning how to be more helpful.
  • Alexa by Amazon

    Alexa by Amazon
    It can perform ever growing tasks. Also, it listens to commands. voice interaction, music playback, and providing weather, traffic, sports, and other information, such as news.
  • Echo Look by Amazon

    Echo Look by Amazon
    Hands free assistant that helps with camera and has Alexa. The Amazon Echo Look responds to the names "Alexa", "Echo", or "Computer". This makes it easy to access when you are not right next to it.
  • Genie X1 by Alibaba

    Genie X1 by Alibaba
    Cheap and available to the public. It is an open platform intelligent personal assistant. AliGenie is capable of smart home control, music playback, voice shopping, taking notes and more. AliGenie also features voice recognition, voiceprint recognition, semantic understanding and speech synthesis.