Abstract:

Our lives have become more fast-paced and hectic than ever before! We communicate, interact and learn online. Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) play a pivotal role in creating a frame with its convenience service that offers a simple, fast and hassle-free connection on which users can communicate through Natural Language Processing (NLP). In other words, IPAs may facilitate human-machine interaction in which users can become active participants during online interaction. In this regard, this study explores IPAs and identifies key concepts by examining existing literature. For this purpose, the research benefited from social network analysis (SNA) and covered 34 years of research (From 1983 to 2017). In this connection, the research sampled keywords of the 274 publications according to their co-occurrences and visualized overall IPA network within the scope of the sampled publications. With a special focus on educational context, the research findings revealed six major themes: (1) Intelligent assistants exist in diverse forms, (2) artificial intelligence as the soul of the intelligent systems, (3) spoken conversation between human and nonhuman entities, (4) rising concerns, (5) human-machine interaction, and (6) machine to machine interaction. The research discusses these themes and further reveals the potential of IPAs for educational use. By providing suggestions on how to use IPAs in online learning processes (e.g.: e-learning, m-learning, and u-learning), the research concludes that IPAs emerge as a promising emerging research area and considering the technologies employed, the evolution of IPAs can go beyond our imaginations.

Keywords:

Intelligent personal assistants, artificial intelligence, intelligent assistants, virtual assistants, intelligent agents, natural language processing (NLP), online learning.