Once upon a time to find a restaurant a person had to flip through a thick, bulky (and sometimes dusty) book. Yes, those were the yellow pages, which incidentally could also be used as a good doorstop. So what is an AI assistant? In the most simplistic terms, its artificial intelligence (AI) that understands natural language (a human voice), jumps into action when given voice commands, and does what it is told to do. Let's examine how digital assistants are being used at home and at work.

Many banks and other financial firms adapted fairly well when COVID-19 struck. They handled the rise in online and mobile transactions, kept in touch with customers and partners while working from home, and adopted social distancing measures as branches and offices reopened. That was the easy part. Now the industry should prepare for a wave of customer inquiries as the effects of the pandemic ripple through the economy. That's likely to put their customer-service centers under stress.

The idea of designing an artificial woman is a tale as old as time. We can go back over 2000 years to Ancient Greece and find the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion. Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with one of his statues which was granted life by Aphrodite. In modern times, we have countless examples of female AI personas, both in science fiction and in real-live systems. Some are embodied, such as Sophia, but some are purely voice-based, such as Amazon's Alexa, Microsoft's array of bots such as Cortana, Xiaoice and Zo.

The introduction of conversational AI to chatbots has expanded their capabilities and is driving business performance to new levels. Conversational AI focuses on communicating through natural language. Users interact with chatbots as though they were having a normal conversation instead of clicking through a menu or using a predetermined command with prefixes. Juniper research predicts conversational AI will cut business expenses by $8 Billion by 2024. The potential cost savings alone warrant further investigation, but conversational AI doesn't only reduce expenses, it produces more conversions and higher revenue.