Intelligent Personal Assistant, Automated Personal Assistant or Automated Virtual Personal Assistant can perform tasks, or services, on behalf of an individual based on a combination of user input, and location awareness. It has the ability to access information from a variety of online sources such as weather conditions, traffic congestion, news, stock prices, user schedules, and retail prices. Intelligent Personal Assistant has the ability to organize and maintain information and includes the management of emails, calendar events, files, and to do lists. Some automated personal assistants can perform concierge type tasks or provide information based on voice input or commands and some smart personal agents, which can automatically perform management or data handling tasks based on online information without user initiation or interaction. Intelligent Agents can be classified based on their degree of perceived intelligence and capability such as simple reflex agents, model-based reflex agents, goal-based agents, utility-based agents and learning agents.

This is such an exciting day for me, and has made me think about how my Mycroft journey started. About a year ago, Mycroft CEO Joshua Montgomery asked me if I would be interested in helping create an artificial intelligence for our makerspace. He wanted to create an environment like the one in Star Trek or Iron Man – where an on-site AI was able to control the lights, locks and communications of the facility. The more I thought about the idea of a voice-enabled artificial intelligence that inhabited a physical space, the more excited I became. I dreamed of an entity that could understand natural language and answer questions, perform tasks, and interact with the environment.