Virtual Assistant
FoundationsApplications and Capabilities
A virtual assistant is software that combines natural language processing, speech recognition and tool execution to help users with administrative, operational or customer service tasks. Newer ones sit on foundation models, so they hold a multi-turn conversation, manage a diary, retrieve a document from the company store and complete a routine back-office transaction without a person driving each step.
In practice
The gap between assistants is not conversational quality but what they are actually wired into: one with no write access to your systems can only tell people things. Ask which systems it can act on, what it is permitted to do without approval, and what the audit trail looks like once it acts.