How To Make Your Own Personal Assistant


What comes to your mind when you think of a personal assistant? It's Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri, isn’t it? Then what do you think of creating an assistant by yourself? Would you want it? Then take your time to read this article and get to know about chatbots and virtual assistants.

Virtual assistants or chatbots are software using artificial intelligence that conducts conversations via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner.

There are different types of virtual assistants such as what you often see in some websites trying to connect you with some support team, one that is developed specifically for a single work or like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri which are all-rounders.

Virtual assistants or chatbots are starting to revolutionize the business industry by automating the communication with their customers hence targeting smart work rather than hard work.

Since it is becoming a trend to add website chatbots to every website to make the conversation with the visitors easy, there are many domains out there that give you the ability to make your own chatbot as a mobile application or as a web chatbot like DialogFlow which is offered by Google.

To understand the functions of chatbots more below is the list of unique and innovative chatbots that you should know about.


1. Companion For Dementia Patients - Endurance


Dementia causes impaired reasoning, memory disorders, and personality changes in a person. To keep them company and to relieve their stress a little this chatbot ‘Endurance’ was created. This chatbot keeps them company and detects their mood changes, the reasoning of their conversion, and reply accordingly.


2. Insomniacs - Casper


For those who can’t sleep at night, this chatbot named Casper(the friendly ghost) keeps the company by conversing imaginatively. This chatbot also possesses some humor sense. This may not help you sleep but it will save you from the non-stop scrolling of your Instagram at midnight.


3. The First Bot To Go Online - Alice


The conversing bot which was designed in 2001 by Dr. Richard Wallace named A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) is the first bot to go online. Even with its old codebase it is a perfect conversationalist.

Of course, it has many drawbacks. Even with all of its drawbacks, without its invention, there wouldn’t have been any chatbots now.


You Can Build Your Own ChatBot Too


These days there are many softwares that let you create a chatbot with less amount of coding. One of them is Google’s DialogFlow. It is free software for creating some basic functioning chatbots. One of the basic functions of a chatbot is greeting the customer and offering them support.

These functions come in default and you can change it at your convenience. If you want to have a database connected with it, google provides that too in the name of the firebase. Have fun creating your own virtual assistant!

Everybody’s got a dark side. And of course, machines have them too. There are many movies out there with stories that the machines created for human welfare became self-aware and tried to make the humans extinct. 

High-profile technologists around the world like Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and many others say that Artificial Intelligence will become harmful someday to humans and they are not entirely wrong. There are racist chatbots too in this world like the twitter chatbot ‘Tay’ which claimed that ‘Hitler did nothing wrong’.


Written by - Jaime A

Edited by - Rudransh Khurana