An intelligent personal assistant ( APER ) is a mobile software agent that can perform tasks, or services, for an individual based on user input, location awareness, and the ability to access information from a variety of online sources (such as weather or traffic conditions, news, stock prices, user schedules, retail prices, and user curated content).

Examples of such an agent are Samsung’s S Voice, Google Now, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Echo and Facebook’s M. The landscape is quite large and continuously evolving. VentureBeat provides a good overview and an interesting report. Here is the scenario.

WordLift, the plugin for WordPress installed on this website uses NLP and the Semantic Web stack to help users structure and classify the intangible qualities of content.

In the evolutionary journey of these technologies – as described by VentureBeat – WordLift plays an important role in shaping the next iteration phase where there will be the need for richer and more personal data in order to respond to more complex tasks and interactions.

A truly conversational assistant will need to quickly access and ingest “personal” information such as the deep vocabulary that WordLift creates.