A virtual assistant powered by AI to answer questions. For example, Siri and Alexa are virtual assistants, whereas Google Assistant, Copilot and ChatGPT are AI assistants.
The lines are blurring because all assistants, whether virtual or AI, share technologies such as voice recognition and natural language processing, which are developed using machine learning. Considering everything is becoming AI enabled, what is not AI today will likely be AI-enabled tomorrow.
AI Assistants vs. AI agents
An AI assistant requires continuous prompting in contrast to an AI agent, which is more autonomous and comprehensive. See
AI agent,
machine learning and
virtual assistant.