A Review of the Current Intelligent Personal Agents

In artificial intelligence, an intelligent personal agent (IPA) is a software designed to use online resources to help people complete simple tasks and respond to questions with natural language. In the market, people wonder if there is a best IPA and have done preliminary testing on them [4]. In this study, we aim at investigating the use of IPAs in people’s daily lives. We are also interested in identifying factors that may have an impact on the usability of IPAs. The IPAs we select are Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana. We first compare the natural language user interfaces of the above mentioned four IPAs. Next, we examine how researchers have evaluated the use of the four IPAs with the focus on identifying factors affecting the usability of the IPAs. At the end, future research directions are discussed.