Can Cognitive Assistants Disappear?

CognItIvE aSSIStantS Various companies have introduced cognitive assistants in recent years, including Aldebaran/Softbank, Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft (see Table 1). Each cognitive assistant helps its user with various tasks. Personal assistants help their humans with everything from communications to entertainment, while professional assistants can greet customers or help improve patient care, for example. These assistants will likely become more commonplace in the future, but their long-term success will depend on how essential they become to their human counterparts. Fundamentally, the use case for these technologies involves a human interacting with them directly. These technologies listen and speak to their users. Many can see their humans and some can move and make gestures. Clearly, these technologies are not intended to disappear from view. They can, however, weave themselves into our everyday lives. They can become essential by performing tasks useful and important to our work and home lives. Such tasks might include