Building the next generation of personal digital Assistants

Voice-based digital Assistants such as Apple's Siri and Google's Now are currently booming. Yet, despite their promise of being context-aware and adapted to a user's preferences and very distinct needs, truly personal assistants are still missing. In this paper we highlight some of the challenges in building personalized speech-operated assistive technology and propose a number of research and development directions we have undertaken in order to solve them. In particular we focus on natural language understanding and dialog management aspects as we believe that these parts of the technology pipeline require the biggest amount of augmentation.