THE ERA OF THE DIGITAL ASSISTANT Alina My Digital Assistant 🤖

What is Virtual Personal Assistant or Digital Assistant?

An Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) or Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA) or Digital Assistant (DA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. Sometimes the term "chatbot" is used. In some cases, chatbot programs are exclusively for entertainment purposes. Some virtual assistants can interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices.

These Digital Assistants (DA) can understand natural language (text or voice) and complete electronic tasks for the end user.

The rise of automation, along with increased computational power, novel application of statistical algorithms, and improved accessibility to data, have resulted in the birth of the personal digital assistant market.

Alina – My Digital Assistant

The world of artificially intelligent assistants is growing — Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Google all the big players in technology have their own. However, many people don’t realize that it’s easy to build their own Digital Assistant for own needs and customized tasks.

I have my own digital assistant named “Alina” and acquiring her cost me nothing except learning. I can’t imagine doing things manually anymore! It’s truly the future.

I developed my assistant Alina with Python. Pythion is a general purpose and high-level programming language.

Why Python?

The simple syntax rules of the python programming language make it easier to keep the code base readable and application maintainable. Its large and robust standard library makes Python score over other programming languages.

The standard library allows to choose from a wide range of modules according to your precise needs. Each module further enables you to add functionality to the Python application without writing additional code and working in Python greatly simplifies the task, giving the ability to make any number of customization to tailor your assistant to suit your needs.

Features of Alina

Like other Digital Assistants ‘Alina’ can access information from a variety of online sources such as weather conditions, traffic congestion, news, stock prices, user schedules, and retail prices etc. In comparison with Alexa, google and Siri, Alina is not equipped fully with advanced AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) at present but it has its own customized functionalities with limited AI and NLP. Alina currently works only in Desktop.

Features:

• Set Alarm and Reminders ⏳
• Play Media (Video & Songs of your choice) 🎶 🎦
• Search Interests, and Flights🛫
• Send Emails and Texts (SMS) 📧
• Find Facts, Files, Places, and Info 👀 🌐📑
• Open Apps.
• Live Weather Data on any location 🌨☔
• Scheduling Meetings 📅
• Send WhatsApp message
• Perform calculations –Elementary math, Scientific, Algebra. The core of this application is the wolfram alpha API. Compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase and AI technology. You can get all sort of stuffs you can think of. 
• News Headline update and Daily Horoscope
• Real time Stock price 📈 and Live Cricket Score 🏏
• Download Videos 🎞
• Encrypt and Decrypt files
• Facebook – Auto login and birthday wish.
• Organize Desktop and files 📑
• Other Desktop operations 💻- Clean temporary files, clean recycle bin, Plot and show CPU usage, Lock and unlock PC, restart PC etc.
• Show internet speed.
• File conversion - Word to PDF, PDF to Word, Excel to CSV, CSV to Excel.
• Customized Office tasks automation. e.g. download time sheets of employee and prepare the productivity report with visual plots 📊
• Language Translation – English to any other language, German and French to English
• Compare Product price in Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal
• Digital Clock and Stopwatch.
• Show World Clock – Time of any part of the world ⏰
• Synonyms, anonymous, meaning of any English word
•  Exchange Rates 💷

Conclusion

New technologies and platforms are emerging, and change is happening faster than ever across the globe. Globalization, digitalization and other mega-trends are bringing radical shifts to how we live and work and hence every one of us as employees and Leaders of organizations must be prepared for continuous exploration of digital trends.

With new advances in AI, Digital assistants are gaining better human intelligence.

Designing your own digital assistant is far from a pipe dream. Recent developments in AI and its ease of accessibility has changed the way we work. Programming languages like Python greatly simplifies the task, giving you the ability to make any number of customization to tailor your assistant to suit your needs.