The heated debates about whether AI might take all our jobs seem to be a thing of the past. Now people have more information about the capabilities of artificial intelligence, its benefits, and its existing limitations. Along with this knowledge came a clearer understanding that AI can become a reliable tool for us, rather than a threat. In this context, a lot of individuals and businesses have other questions. They want to know how they can use AI to leverage maximum efficiency. One of the ways to do this is by introducing AI-powered assistants. In this article, we are going to talk about the functionality of such solutions and explain how to create an AI assistant to address your unique business needs.

AI assistants: Basic info you need to know

An AI assistant can be defined as a digital application powered by artificial intelligence that is designed to help users perform tasks, retrieve information, and interact with systems through natural language. In other words, as such apps can understand human language and respond to it, the interaction with them becomes highly intuitive and user-friendly.

Want to better understand what an AI personal assistant can offer? It’s worth having a look at the core features that it may have.

• Natural language understanding. AI assistants can interpret human speech or written text and understand the intent behind it.
• Task automation. Such solutions can handle repetitive tasks. In the business sphere, they can be responsible for setting reminders, scheduling appointments, or managing emails.
• Information retrieval. Your AI personal assistant can search for specific information based on your requests. For instance, it can provide you with some simple data like weather updates or more complex information like technical explanations.
• Personalization. Virtual assistants can learn the preferences, interests, and habits of users from the interactions. This helps to make conversations more result-oriented and efficient as users can get responses that better align with their needs.
• Conversational abilities. Today, it is possible to create an AI assistant that will be able to engage in meaningful conversations. Moreover, such solutions can remember the context within a session to provide coherent responses. You can read more about conversational AI technology here.
• Proactive suggestions. Virtual assistants can anticipate user needs by analyzing patterns and offering helpful suggestions. For example, they can recommend a user leave for a meeting earlier because of heavy traffic. Or they can send a reminder about a presentation for an upcoming conference.
• Integration with apps and services. It is possible to build your own AI assistant that will be connected with third-party apps, like Uber or Spotify, and business systems, like CRM or ERP software.

It’s highly likely that you already have experience of interaction with an AI personal assistant, even if you didn’t know that this app can be included in this category. Here are a couple of well-known examples.

• General-purpose AI assistants: Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa.
• Enterprise and productivity AI assistants: IBM Watson Assistant, Zoho’s Zia, Einstein Copilot AI Assistant by Salesforce.
• Chat-Based AI assistants: ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude.
• Specialized AI assistants: Robin (AI for drivers), Jasper (for marketers and content creators).

In 2024, the market size of intelligent virtual assistants reached the level of $14.25 billion. Given the growing demand for such solutions and their ongoing adoption, it is projected that, by 2031, this figure will go beyond $87 billion. Expanding at such a pace over a forecast period from 2024 to 2031, the market will demonstrate a CAGR of 28%.

What are the main factors that push the market growth?

• Progress in AI and NLP. Today, we can observe a growing number of companies and experts involved in the development of artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies.  These achievements have a direct impact on the capabilities of virtual assistants to interpret and react to complicated user queries, and consequently, on the effectiveness, functionality, and utility of such solutions.
• Increased demand for automation. The demand for automation of manual processes in both personal and professional aspects of our lives is also among the influencing factors. Today there are already a lot of applications and tools that can automate some separate tasks. Now, it is possible to build AI assistant that will replace a dozen of such standalone apps. Artificial intelligence can help users significantly save time and effort. As a result, they have the possibility to concentrate more on more complex tasks that require their creativity and strategic planning.
• Wider adoption of smart devices. IoT and smart devices today are widely applied in different spheres, including multiple business domains. Virtual assistants can be integrated to manage different connected systems. This can ensure smooth user experiences and speed up the process of solving many tasks with their help.
• Higher user expectations. Nowadays, we all, as clients and users, expect much more personalized and seamless interaction with tech solutions than ever before. Advanced AI solutions can meet this demand. This is also a strong factor that boosts the adoption of such AI-driven software across many industries.

Why is it worth creating your own AI personal assistant? Top benefits

As you can see, the market for personal virtual assistants is actively expanding amid the growing demand for them. Tech giants and startups are working on the introduction of new, more powerful ready-made solutions that are available either for free or on a paid basis. It is easy to start using such solutions. And at first glance, it may seem that there are options practically for any personal or business needs.

Nevertheless, a lot of businesses still prefer to launch their custom solution. Yes, it may be a more time-consuming and expensive initiative in comparison to the introduction of an off-the-shelf app. But it does have its undeniable benefits.

Here is why it is a good idea to create your own AI assistant.

Customization

Unlike off-the-shelf AI assistants available to a wide audience, a custom tool can be designed to meet your unique requirements. It can be tailored to niche workflows and specific industries.

Increased efficiency

Your own solution can be fine-tuned based on your needs. For example, it can be trained for quick decision-making and on-demand assistance. 

Long-term cost-effectiveness

The development of a custom AI personal assistant will require investments. Once implemented, a custom AI assistant can reduce operational costs. Handling tasks with AI will turn out to be a more feasible solution than hiring extra staff. Apart from this, you should bear in mind that the use of ready-made assistants is usually associated with subscription fees. The development of your own AI tool will eliminate your reliance on costly third-party services and ongoing subscription fees.

Scalability

As your needs grow, you can enhance your solution with new features and integrations. You can make decisions on your own without waiting for updates from third-party providers.

Seamless integrations

You will have full freedom in your app’s integrations. It can be connected with your preferred business tools and APIs for smooth operations. You can also seamlessly connect your assistant to devices relevant to your work. Apart from this, you can ensure interoperability between platforms that ready-made AI assistants may not support.

Ownership of development and innovation

You will have full control over your custom solution. This will let you upgrade and adapt features as soon as new use cases emerge. You can experiment with any innovative technologies that will be helpful in your operations. Thanks to this, a custom AI assistant can successfully differentiate your business from competitors by offering superior customer or employee experiences.‍

Platforms that can be used to create an AI assistant

Today even users with minimal tech expertise can build their own AI solutions. Probably you wonder how it is possible given the fact that virtual assistants are rather complex software tools. It’s possible thanks to the availability of special frameworks and platforms. They are designed to help even non-technical specialist create their own chatbots and AI assistants. Of course, when relying on such platforms you may lose some flexibility that is typical for custom development from scratch. 

Nevertheless, this approach still has a lot of advantages, such as:

• Faster development time. Such platforms often come with ready-to-use components like natural language understanding, intent recognition, in-built interactions, etc. As a result, your team will avoid a big part of manual coding.
• Pre-trained models. Many frameworks use pre-trained models for intent recognition and entity extraction. This can improve response accuracy and let you save time.
• Community and support. Popular frameworks have large developer communities, forums, and tutorials. This makes troubleshooting and the process of learning easier. Apart from this, frameworks often receive updates to keep up with new technologies and security protocols.

To rely on such development platforms or create an AI assistant fully from scratch is a question that you should answer on your own based on a row of business factors. You need to evaluate your budget, your specific requirements, and the availability of tech experts. To make a final decision, it will also be useful to consider the available platforms for building AI assistants. Below you can find a couple of the most well-known examples.

• ChatGPT. This platform can enable you to build AI-driven apps with the help of simple tools and interfaces. How to make your own AI assistant with ChatGPT? To interact with this platform, you do not need to code. Your “communication” with it will rely on prompts. You can work with ChatGPT via OpenAI API. This API can be used to integrate the assistant into your application, website, or system. Apart from this, you can utilize platforms like Zapier or Microsoft Power Automate that offer ways to connect ChatGPT to workflows without extensive coding.
• Lindy. This is a no-code builder that does not require any specific skills from users. With its help, you can build customized AI assistants to address different needs. Assistants created with Lindy can help you interact with your customers, schedule meetings, and prepare to-do lists. To make the use of such solutions as efficient as possible, businesses need to apply their own data for training.
• SignalWire. This platform allows users to create voice assistants with conversational AI. Traditional development presupposes programming and pre-defining all the possible actions that your app will be able to perform. With this platform, such efforts are not required. It is enough just to provide text instructions and some context, and the platform will do all the work.

How to create a personal AI assistant from scratch?

Custom development from scratch can seem to be a rather tricky task, especially for those companies that do not have in-house tech experts. That’s why if you are planning to build such a solution, it’s always better to establish cooperation with a company that has relevant experience in AI software development. A good team is one of the key components of success. Excellent planning is another one.

To simplify this process for you, we prepared the following step-by-step guide on how to make an AI assistant.

Step 1. Identify the purposes of your AI assistant.

You should clearly understand why you want to launch this solution and what tasks it will perform. Based on this, you will be able to determine its target audience and core functionality.

Step 2. Choose the right development stack.

Your choice should depend on different factors, including the functionality of your solution and the expertise of your team. Apart from technologies and tools that are used for building any software product (like a programming language), you will also need to opt for tools typical for AI apps:

• NLP frameworks:  spaCy, NLTK, PyTorch, or Hugging Face.
• ML libraries: TensorFlow, Keras, NumPy, Matplotlib.
• Voice recognition and synthesis engines: CMU Sphinx, Google Te­xt-to-Speech, Mozilla DeepSpeech.

Step 3. Collect and prepare data for your AI assistant.

To train your AI in understanding and generating human language, you need to have comprehensive datasets. They can be sourced from publicly available data or these may be your custom datasets. In this case, you need to gather and annotate text manually to make sure that it aligns with your specific requirements.

Step 4. Preprocess and clean your data.

It is not enough just to collect your data. It is also necessary to prepare it for effective training. Key tasks will be:

• Tokenization of text. It means splitting it into individual words, or tokens, to simplify processing and analysis.
• Eliminating common words like articles and prepositions. They usually do not significantly contribute to the understanding of the data.
• Text normalizing. This presupposes converting text to a consistent, standard format to make it easier to process. You may need to remove punctuation and convert all characters to lowercase.

Step 5. Train your AI virtual assistant.

At this step, you need to train your app using advanced ML models. They will teach your solution how to understand and respond effectively to user input. The exact process may differ depending on the chosen technology stack.

Step 6. Build a user interface (UI).

The user interface will be responsible for smooth interactions with your AI solution. It determines how users engage with the assistant and how well it understands their queries. At this step, you should concentrate on creating seamless conversation flows and user experiences.

Step 7. Test your solution.

It’s crucial to detect possible bugs before users can do it. That’s why before the launch we recommend you test your AI assistant in various use cases to detect potential issues and address them.

Step 8. Deploy and continuously improve your AI assistant.

Once your AI assistant is trained and tested, it’s time to deploy it into a live environment. However, deployment is not the end of the process. Continuous improvement is crucial to ensure that the assistant stays relevant and responsive to users’ needs.

How to build an efficient AI personal assistant: Our insights

The development of any software product has its own specifics. The creation of an AI assistant is no exception. Based on our practical experience and understanding of industry nuances, we have formulated a set of rules that can be applied to such projects.

Rule 1. Specialization

On the one hand, it may seem to be a good idea to build a solution that will cover as many use cases as possible. However, let’s be honest. Such solutions may look impressive. But quite often they can’t cope with any specific tasks. And their value for businesses is usually rather low. We recommend you build AI assistants with clear specific use cases, instead of general-purpose apps.

Rule 2. High quality of data

Data is the foundation of any AI solution. Without robust datasets, even the most advanced algorithms cannot perform optimally. Data can be taken from different sources, like public repositories, received through user interactions, or generated synthetically. However, it always must be carefully curated, annotated, and managed. Only in this case, you will be able to unlock the full potential of your AI assistants.

Rule 3. Right expectations

Your AI assistant will have limitations. You and your employees should be ready for this. That’s completely natural. And that’s not a reason to get annoyed, especially given the fact that you can work on the improvement of your AI personal assistant over time. Nevertheless, your employees and customers (if they will interact with your virtual assistant) should be informed about possible limitations. This step is essential for managing expectations and building trust. 

Personal AI: Future trends

Personal AI technology is evolving rapidly. But even the capabilities that it has today already let us make an assumption that it can fully transform the way we interact with various solutions and devices in our professional and daily lives.

What trends are shaping its further development?

1. Hyper-personalization. In the future, AI will be able to analyze user habits, preferences, and behaviors even more efficiently than it does today. It will do this in real time to offer highly personalized recommendations and assistance. Moreover, it will be able to understand and adapt to contextual cues, such as location, mood, or current activity, for more intuitive interactions.
2. Seamless multimodal interfaces. AI assistants will combine voice, text, gestures, and visual inputs. This will ensure a unified and flexible user experience.
3. Autonomous decision-making. This will allow AI to deal with increasingly complex tasks autonomously. For example, it will be able to book trips or manage finances without human intervention.
4. Advanced emotional intelligence.  AI will leverage advanced sentiment analysis. Thanks to this, it will be able to detect and respond appropriately to users’ emotional states. Apart from this, future assistants will exhibit empathetic behaviors. Such changes will enable AI personal assistants to support mental health or provide companionship.
5. Enhanced collaboration with humans. AI will become more than just a tool for such tasks as writing, designing, or coding. AI assistants will be able to work alongside humans as collaborators. They will also become tutors and mentors. This will provide a highly individualized learning approach.

Final word

A few years ago, when AI solutions (and specifically ChatGPT) became available to the general public, many believed the hype surrounding this technology would fade soon. However, as time has passed, it has become absolutely clear that the use of AI is not just a modern trend. It is a truly effective solution. In the future, AI assistants could become an absolute necessity for any business that wants to stay afloat and respond quickly to market changes.

If you are thinking about building your custom AI assistant and are looking for a tech partner, we will always be happy to help you. At Tensorway, we have solid expertise in AI development and an open mind to all the latest tech trends. We know how to harness the full power of AI and would be delighted to share this knowledge and expertise with you.

Do not hesitate to contact us to learn more about how to make your own AI assistant and how we can support you in this journey.

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