AI assistant

An AI assistant is a program that relies on artificial intelligence ✕ Artificial intelligence is a computer system’s ability to perform tasks we associate with human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognizing images or making decisions. More in the glossary → to help a person carry out tasks by communicating in natural language, whether by voice or in writing. It can answer questions, write and summarise texts, set reminders, look up information, control home devices or chain together several steps of a job. The label covers both the classic voice assistants — such as Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant — and the modern conversational assistants built on large language models ✕ An LLM is an AI model trained on huge amounts of text to understand and generate language. It is the engine behind assistants like ChatGPT. More in the glossary → , like ChatGPT ✕ GPT is the family of large language models from OpenAI behind ChatGPT. It generates text by predicting, unit by unit, the most likely continuation. More in the glossary → , Copilot or Gemini. It differs from a plain chatbot ✕ A chatbot is a program you converse with by text or voice. Modern ones use AI to understand and respond in natural language. More in the glossary → in that it is geared towards helping complete tasks, not just holding a conversation; the most advanced ones edge towards the idea of an AI agent ✕ An AI agent does not just answer; it carries out multi-step tasks on its own: it searches, uses tools and acts to reach a goal. More in the glossary → , able to act on its own and use other tools. In practice, it is one of the ways AI reaches people’s everyday life.