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Manifestation of virtual assistants and robots into daily life: vision and challenges

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Abstract

Similar to how the smartphone and Internet have significantly changed our daily lives, artificial intelligence (AI) applications have started to profoundly affect our everyday lives as well. Two major products of this relatively recent trend are virtual assistants and home robots. They have similar functional characteristics: both interact with users through conversational agents and attempt to imitate human behavior. Home robots host a virtual assistant and have mechanical capabilities as well. There are many discussions about risks, challenges and the future vision associated with the proliferation of AI at the industrial level. These discussions, however, have not yet widely extended to the user level within the context of daily lives. In this article, we provide a review to discuss the benefits, risks, challenges, open questions and the future vision of using virtual assistants and social robots in daily lives.

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Notes

  1. Voice-activated device called 911 during attack, New Mexico authorities say https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/10/us/alexa-calls-police-trnd/index.html [accessed 19th Jul 2019].

  2. Jibo robot homepage: http://www.jibo.com [accessed 20th July 2019].

  3. Nao robot homepage: https://www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/robots/nao [accessed 20th July 2019].

  4. Tamagotchi toy home page: https://www.bandai.com/tamagotchi [accessed 20 Jul 2019].

  5. How conversation (with context) will usher in the AI future. https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/future-of-artificial-intelligence/ai-conversation.html [accessed 20th Jul 2019].

  6. Amazon Alexa skill repository https://www.amazon.com/b?node=13727921011 [accessed 20th Jul 2019].

  7. Kuri production has been suspended https://www.heykuri.com/explore-kuri/ [accessed 20th Jul 2019].

  8. Cosmo Robot homepage https://anki.com/en-us/cozmo.html [accessed 20th July 2019].

  9. Gatebox virtual assistant which contains embodification: https://gatebox.ai/home [accessed 19th July 2019].

  10. Microsoft Office Assistant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant [accessed 19th July 2019].

  11. Amazon Echo conversation recording scandal https://wapo.st/2J6FRqw?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.60760235f59c [accessed 20th Jul 2019].

  12. http://hyper-reality.co.

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Acknolwedgements

Authors are thankful to Fereshteh Alikhani for drawing the illustrations used in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Metropolitan College, Boston University, Boston, USA

    Reza Rawassizadeh

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, New York, USA

    Taylan Sen

  3. Department of Health Behavior and Policy, School of Medicine, Massey Cancer Center, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA

    Sunny Jung Kim

  4. Department of Computer Science, Telecooperation Group, Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Christian Meurisch & Max Mühlhäuser

  5. Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

    Hamidreza Keshavarz

  6. Department of Computer Science, University of California Riverside, Riverside, USA

    Michael Pazzani

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  1. Reza Rawassizadeh
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  2. Taylan Sen
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Correspondence to Reza Rawassizadeh.

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Rawassizadeh, R., Sen, T., Kim, S.J. et al. Manifestation of virtual assistants and robots into daily life: vision and challenges. CCF Trans. Pervasive Comp. Interact. 1, 163–174 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42486-019-00014-1

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