Signal Processing - January 2017 - 67

Ruhi Sarikaya

The Technology Behind
Personal Digital Assistants
An overview of the system architecture and key components

Background image ©istockphoto.com/ traffic_analyzer;
pda image ©istockphoto.com/hudiemm

W

e have long envisioned that one day computers will
understand natural language and anticipate what we
need, when and where we need it, and proactively
complete tasks on our behalf. As computers get smaller and more pervasive, how humans interact with them is
becoming a crucial issue. Despite numerous attempts over the
past 30 years to make language understanding (LU) an effective and robust natural user interface for computer interaction,
success has been limited and scoped to applications that were
not particularly central to everyday use. However, speech recognition and machine learning have continued to be refined,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2016.2617341
Date of publication: 11 January 2017

1053-5888/17©2017IEEE

and structured data served by applications and content providers has emerged. These advances, along with increased computational power, have broadened the application of natural
LU to a wide spectrum of everyday tasks that are central to a
user's productivity. We believe that as computers become
smaller and more ubiquitous [e.g., wearables and Internet of
Things (IoT)], and the number of applications increases, both
system-initiated and user-initiated task completion across various applications and web services will become indispensable
for personal life management and work productivity. In this
article, we give an overview of personal digital assistants
(PDAs); describe the system architecture, key components,
and technology behind them; and discuss their future
potential to fully redefine human-computer interaction.

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

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January 2017

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - January 2017

Signal Processing - January 2017 - Cover1
Signal Processing - January 2017 - Cover2
Signal Processing - January 2017 - 1
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Signal Processing - January 2017 - Cover3
Signal Processing - January 2017 - Cover4
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