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A new W3C community group is exploring ways to make virtual assistant platforms interoperable
irtual assistants-whether personal assistants like Siri, Cortana, Google Now, or Alexa, or enterprise assistants tailored for a company-are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous, and important, form of voice application: Business Wire recently reported that the market for virtual assistants will reach $15.8 billion by 2021. Unlike traditional IVR systems, these virtual assistants are characterized by open-ended spoken and text natural language input. Interactions can be initiated by the user, or both the system and the user, which results in a much more natural interface than the strictly system-driven dialogues common in IVRs. Virtual assistants are also starting to be able to have limited conversational interchanges, at least to the point where the user can ask follow-up questions.
The best-known assistants are all based on proprietary technologies. We are starting to see some opening up of APIs, like Alexa Skills Kit and SiriKit, to third-party development, and companies such Openstream and Pandorabots offer standard and/or open authoring frameworks for virtual assistant applications. True interoperability between platforms, however, remains elusive.
Yet such interoperability would garner...