In yet another attempt to implement ideas from science fiction films, tech giants, one after another, began working on virtual assistants. At the Google I/O 2016 conference the company presented Google Assistant, as well as an analogue of Amazon Echo - home voice Google Assistant Home.

The latest major company to enter the virtual assistant race. Let's figure out what competitors it has (including among startups).

First, let's remember what Google Now is.

Google Voice Search/Google Now

Peculiarities: Fast. Extremely accurate when creating routes. It frightens you with its knowledge of your flights, bookings and other details. with some third party applications: Manage notes, messages, and music playback.

Flaws: Sometimes you get bored with excessive initiative (for example, it shows the results of games of teams that are not interesting to you, or routes to home from famous places). Useless when managing " smart home" Work on integration with third-party applications seems to have stalled.

Humanity Level: Null. Not conducive to communication. It doesn't even have a name other than Google.

Summary: Google's vast reserves of personal data and access to a search engine should, in theory, make Google an industry leader, but the company has yet to even figure out how to leverage its advantages and create an assistant that can understand the user. Today Google Now and voice search They compete on equal terms with Siri, but have not yet reached a new level of development.

And now - about competitors.

Apple Siri

What: A voice assistant that can talk to the user and give proactive recommendations. Activated by long pressing the Home button on the iPad. Assistant support has recently appeared on Apple TV and Apple Watch.

Peculiarities: Easy to use on iOS devices. Understands natural speech. Knowledgeable about news, weather, sports, movies, routes and local businesses. Can tell you what to watch on TV. Able to interact with some elements of a “smart home”.

Flaws: Cannot interact with most other applications and services. Works slower than some competitors.

Humanity Level: Unable to carry on a full conversation, but certain moments demonstrates his own wisdom. The female voice sounds relatively human.

Flaws: It feels great on Windows - a platform that is least interesting to developers, and, possibly, to users. Using the assistant on Android and iOS is more difficult and has fewer functions.

Humanity Level: Loves jokes, especially banal ones. Has a long list of witty responses ready general issues. Can read passages from Shakespeare.

Summary: After years of being in the shadows of Siri and Google, Cortana has become a much more interesting chatbot. Microsoft wants to make its voice assistant the underlying intelligence for all other bots, able to manage your travels, meetings, to-do lists and other things, as well as increase integration with other Microsoft products, such as Office. The company's goal is to create a new shell for computing technology in the post-PC era, but it's too early to judge whether it will succeed or not.

Facebook M

What: Partly managed, partly by people, and still in development. M will be a text-based assistant in the Facebook Messenger environment.

Peculiarities: Will try to do everything you ask.

Flaws: It is not yet a finished product, and will not be for a long time. Available only to a small number of users in San Francisco.

Humanity Level: Extremely high, since people will be involved in shaping the answers to questions. According to Wired, the company hopes that over time M will learn from these operators and be able to work more independently.

Summary: On this moment M is just a little more than just an idea. But given Facebook's interest in chatbots in general, it wouldn't be surprising if M ends up being super-intelligent.

X.ai

What: One of the few virtual assistants that has only one function. It works only through e-mail, where it can make appointments at your request.

Peculiarities: Knows your schedule and preferences, negotiates with other participants for you.

Peculiarities: Viv promises that their product will be able to understand complex questions such as: “Will the temperature near the Golden Gate Bridge be above 20 degrees the day after tomorrow after 5 pm?” Work is underway to ensure compatibility with third-party applications.

Flaws: So far, other than prepared presentations, there is no evidence that everything works exactly as stated.

Humanity Level: Values ​​visual aids and specific answers more highly than detailed description. The presence of wit is questionable.

Flaws: Integration options with third-party applications are limited, and it is impossible to open the service directly on iOS or Android. Requests that the assistant cannot recognize are redirected to Ask.com.

Humanity Level: He is not conducive to long conversations, but knows how to answer additional questions.

Summary: It appears that Hound's mobile apps really only exist to showcase the capabilities of the Houndify service (adding voice assistant functionality to any app - editor's note), which SoundHound plans to sell to other companies. If everything works out, we won’t even know that we are using it.

Ozlo

What: AI, whose main function at the moment is to search for cafes, bars and restaurants. Available for limited quantity users.

Peculiarities: Finds and combines data from multiple sources, including Yelp and Foursquare, and then presents everything in the form of convenient cards. Tries to communicate by asking and answering follow-up questions, such as “what places are open now?” or “what’s on their menu?”

Flaws: Limited features unless Ozlo creators add new features. AI relies heavily on users to train.

Humanity Level: Avoids unnecessary pleasantries, only briefly greets by name.

Summary: Ozlo would be no different from many other chatbots if it did not have the prospect of creating something more. The ability to combine data from multiple sources into a single result is unique, but it remains to be seen whether developers will be able to realize the full potential they claim. In the meantime, Ozlo's business plan is limited to just the app, and there may be problems collecting the data necessary for training.

SpeakToIt Assistant.ai

What: One of many copies of Siri. In the app store, searching for Siri brings up many similar programs, such as Voice Commands, Voice Secretary and Assistant.

Peculiarities: Not much different from Siri, but can learn custom commands to activate a list of functions.

Flaws: Not as useful as the built-in assistant on your smartphone, and not as convenient.

Humanity Level: It sounds rather unnatural, but portrays himself as a human assistant whose gender and appearance can be changed.

Summary: Some of these Siri clones look like a relic of the past, when not all iPhone models could work with Apple's proprietary assistant and needed a replacement. In any case, it seems that their creators are aware that this approach will not achieve success. For example, SpeakToIt moved to create a set of tools that other developers could use to make their own chatbots.

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Do you need a virtual assistant?

Back in the mid-90s, when I was just starting my career, I gained my first experience using the services of a freelancer. One of the most memorable moments occurred during a small discussion with a group led by the writer. I don't remember his name, but I remember that he referred to his personal assistant. Does this writer have a personal assistant? I didn’t really understand why he needed this. Despite the fact that at that time, everything was fine with me, I managed to do everything, the thought of paying someone to work, even part-time, seemed like crazy nonsense, a cheap show off, or a stupid waste of money However, over the following years, I increasingly began to hear from my colleagues and acquaintances who referred to their virtual assistants. And now I'm finally starting to realize my mistake in underestimating all the benefits of using a personal assistant. And at the end of the day, I pay for a house cleaning service, I pay people to do their tax returns. Why not pay for a virtual assistant?

When should you hire a VA?

A virtual assistant, or VA for short, is someone who can help with minor tasks such as filling out invoices, managing schedules, and answering emails. emails, composing texts on a certain topic - all this is done remotely. So when should you hire him? There is no clear answer to this question. I got some answers from talking to several freelancers who hired VAs to help them. For Andrey Rotonov, a project manager from Kirov who specializes in processing editorial projects for clients and the National Education Association. The turning point came when he started losing money. “When my mail with orders was so full that I had to cut back on work. The job I love, I knew it was time to hire an assistant,” said Andrey. For Zhenya Gregina, a B2B marketing specialist based in Izhevsk, it all came down to time management issues. Zhenya decided that it would be nice to stop working until 3 am. And for Tanya Kaseleva, a writer, editor, and trainer in Minsk, her main goal was to eliminate the secondary tasks that took up a lot of time so that she could pursue higher goals. People have many common points and we are alike in many ways. Perhaps you've just had a baby, are sick, or are caring for elderly parents - these are just a few possible situations where you might need a little outside help.

How much can a VA cost?

In order for you to decide, you must know how much VA services cost. According to a review of freelancing platforms, VA services range from $5 to $7 per hour. On a writers' forum, they mentioned that they pay their VAs between $5 and $10 an hour. Gregory pays his VA $15 an hour, but he told me that he has a habit of overpaying when he finds that the VA's work really appeals to him because her work is so specialized. His VA usually works about seven hours a week for him, but how many hours your VA will work for you is up to you. The most important thing is to solve some theoretical equations about the benefits and feasibility of using a VA, is it possible that you will have to charge higher prices for your services to compensate for the cost of the VA? Of course, there is no way to know for sure how a BA will affect your work.

Where to look for VA

There is no universal formula for finding a VA, but there are freelancing platforms such as fl.ru, freelancehant.com, flassist.ru and others that you can check out. One of my friends found her assistant on the pages of one of the social networks by searching for profiles offering similar services. She works with a twenty-five-year-old woman from the Baltics who has experience working for large publishing companies. “She's coming back from maternity leave this year and is ready to work full time again as a virtual assistant,” she said. “Her skills meshed well with my needs. She worked 20 hours a week, which is perfect for me, but I would love to go full-time with her next year.” Make sure you are clear about what you want and what your goals are from the very beginning.

Actual value of VA

However, if we have something in common, you might be wondering if you're organized enough to be a virtual assistant. With a virtual assistant, you need to be at least organized enough to give your VA enough work. I used to dismiss the idea of ​​working with a virtual assistant and argued passionately about it. But now I ask myself how much time was wasted and how stupid I was not to use it. By unloading myself as much as possible from unnecessary routine work, which is not difficult, but takes a lot of time, frees up free time for me, which I can use to increase my competitiveness and improve the quality of my services, time that costs much more than I spend on use of VA.

Imagine the situation: you live in a country where you do not have the opportunity to work. The children are growing up, I want to realize myself professionally, but I have no ideas for my own business, and I only have an hour or two of free time a day. Sound familiar?

I think I'm not alone in this situation. I’ve been living in Cyprus for a long time, but I don’t have a work permit, and it’s quite difficult to find work in our village. Therefore, I began to think about remote work via the Internet - I ran my own blog, administrated several groups on Facebook to support the local community, wrote articles, took photographs, but did not understand how to translate this hobby into a paid activity.

Yes, I read advertising articles for schools that teach various professions online, but it was not clear to me how to find a job later, how to work with clients, how to hook a client when there are many newcomers like me in the market...

And so, when some time ago I read an article about the “Virtual Assistant” profession, it clicked in me - here it is! That's the thing I was looking for.

What is a virtual assistant? This is a universal specialist who helps an entrepreneur conduct business on the Internet - fills pages in in social networks, designs landing pages and presentations, organizes webinars and sets up mailing lists. Depending on previous experience, an assistant can specialize in one direction or another. But in general, this is a person who is well versed in the Internet, can find the right service, write a request, control contractors and be that multi-armed, multi-machine operator who will relieve the entrepreneur of routine responsibilities. And it doesn’t matter what country the entrepreneur lives in or what citizenship the Virtual Assistant has - they meet and collaborate on the Internet.

• By 2020, 20% of jobs in Russia will be virtual, according to a study by J’son & Partners Consulting, commissioned by the Bitrix24 service. According to 2016 studies, this figure in Europe is 17%, and in Japan and the USA it reaches 40% of all workers.

I googled it and realized that in the English-speaking environment this profession is very common, there are even associations of business assistants. There is less information in the Russian-speaking space, but there are several schools for training virtual assistants. And all of them - which is very valuable - promise help with internships and employment. You can see the results of the study of schools that train business assistants on my Facebook page. I chose the International School for Training Business Assistants and Internet Marketers “Helppy” by Olga Shevchenko and did not regret a minute. Both the organization of training and the usefulness of information are excellent!

The training lasts five weeks and the immersion in study is complete. In 35 days, you delve into the principles of organizing an Internet business, layout a presentation in Power Point, draw up a content plan and a schedule of posts within the framework of your own developed social media promotion strategy, create a landing page - a one-page website, and also - TA-DAM! – you create a portfolio for yourself. It is clear that these are not all topics, but only those on which homework was required, and on which we all pored over at night. For all your homework you receive detailed answers, and very rarely did you manage to pass them the first time, they asked you very strictly - either the typography was lame, or the design failed.

In addition to lectures and educational material, a closed section contains a database of useful articles, the secret group is full of life - curators and fellow students discuss assignments, and on Fridays Olga Shevchenko talks to each student separately and answers all their questions.

Creating a portfolio is a huge blow to your self-esteem. After you have collected everything you can, apply the rules of strong text, add customer reviews there (we did our homework on behalf of online entrepreneurs, and they wrote reviews for us), select fonts, and then put it into a landing page with beautiful pictures... This makes your self-esteem rise, and you are ready for exploits and new achievements. Would you like to see my portfolio? . I’m showing it to you not to brag, but to show what you can get out of it.

It’s good that I started studying in advance, so I even had time to sleep and manage the clients I found right there, next to me. The fact is that when you start studying and delving into a topic, your vision sharpens and you see that in this project, for example, you can be useful, but here you can turn the page and get completely different results. You offer your services, show what you can do, how you can help, and people respond. This is how many of my fellow students and I got our jobs.

I don’t promise an easy life - you will have to study and work a lot, information on the Internet changes quickly, Facebook, for example, has innovations every week, more and more people enter the labor market every day. You will need to build your work schedule and think about time management. For example, I typed a draft of this article on my phone in Google copy while the pedicurist was working on my feet. And I had to refuse one very promising offer, because I understood - either work or family, there was no third option, I couldn’t cope with everything at the moment.

The virtual assistant is software, which performs tasks from the user. First similar systems appeared back in the 1980s, but the closest was the assistant installed on the very first IBM Watson smartphone, released back in 1994. And the very first voice assistant installed on modern smartphone, became Apple's Siri, introduced in October 2011.

Methods of working with virtual assistants:

• Text message. Common when working with chatbots.
• Voice command. As with Siri and many other modern voice assistants.
• Loading a specific image, as is the case on the latest S8 flagship.

Some virtual assistants offer users several options for working with them at once. So you can give commands to Google Assistant through Allo chat, and control home exercises with your voice through the Google Home speaker. Modern voice assistants use technology to recognize your normal voice, and also use machine learning techniques, being artificial intelligence.

The most common voice virtual assistants

Previous generations of virtual assistants had an avatar. Many (but not all) modern assistants also have their own characters, and their developers give the systems personalized names. Here are the most common, functional and dynamically developing virtual assistants:

These assistants are mostly compatible with the Internet of Things (the exceptions are M and Cortana), and have additional mobile app for work and can always be turned on (the exceptions are the same) for quick access to all their functionality.

Internet of Things gadgets for smart homes are created with support for working with such assistants. The choice of a virtual assistant and additional resources for it should be made taking into account the connected devices, because the management of the Internet of Things system is still not perfect. Some gadgets support some systems, others - others. To avoid confusion, you should stick to one system. In any case, until the most universal one finally appeared, which would unite them all.

Devices that support virtual assistants

Virtual assistants can be integrated on different types platforms. Or, as in the case of Amazon Alexa, work on several at once. Often virtual assistants are supported by the following platforms:

The functionality of the virtual assistant will be limited to the device itself and the operating system. At the same time, such assistants are developing and becoming multi-platform, making it very easy to switch between different compatible devices.

A virtual assistant can do all of their work from home. The assistant will earn money using a computer and telephone. A virtual assistant is a fairly in-demand profession, because there are quite a large number of companies that need to do this or that work and it is simply not profitable to employ someone officially. Among the tasks of such employees will be: helping clients set up something, answering emails, and other employers offer virtual assistants to perform some accountant functions. All of the above work is done by remote assistants at home, by the way, a very smart move by managers, because they don’t need to arrange such performers for work, which means there is no extra headache about the workplace in the office, social services. there will be no package and other things.

Why companies are turning to virtual assistants

As mentioned above, official hiring brings a lot of problems to the employer: securing a workplace, this includes the purchase of equipment (computer or telephone). You also won’t have to spend money and time on training a newly hired employee. As modern practice shows, there are a huge variety of tasks and responsibilities that a remote worker can perform. Creation and work with databases, travel arrangements, publishing work, tasks related to medical topics. The functions that a remote assistant can perform may also vary depending on the skills of the performer.

“Being a virtual assistant” - what is it?

Paid similar work immediately upon completion, if the task of the remote assistant is any project, then the payment will be hourly. A virtual assistant must have a telephone, a computer with Internet access, and sometimes this includes a fax line. There are several ways in which a representative of such a profession receives his assignments, one of them is postal transfer. Usually, post services paid by the company. To complete this or that task is allocated certain time, the same applies to payment; when and how it will be made can be discussed in advance. Wage can be regular, as if you were an employee on the company’s staff.

Finding a similar vacancy is easy. To do this, you need to use the services of the World Wide Web. Any search site - Google, Rambler, Yahoo - in the search bar you need to enter “VA”; this abbreviation is a fairly common expression or “virtual assistant”. After which you will receive a list of offers and the necessary information.

P.S. If you want to open a full-fledged business in Prague, click on the link and they will help you. Professional approach, reasonable prices and high quality are waiting for you on the proposed site.

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