Graphic showing contextually intelligent assistants

Contextually Intelligent Assistants

A truly intelligent virtual assistant could make many new functions possible. As we envision this agent, it would have the capabilities to:

  • Understand your world,
  • Leverage context to inform its actions,
  • Interact with you naturally and effectively.

The Contextually Intelligent Assistants project makes progress toward the type of contextual intelligence needed for next-generation assistants.  It does this by improving the state-of-the-art in understanding task intent from task descriptions; modeling key contextual signals, such as location and time; enabling quick in-context capture of information; improving context-sensitive proactive and reactive retrieval; and managing notifications intelligently.

Our aim is to make it easier for people to accomplish what they want, on any device, by making deep use of context when reactively responding to people’s queries and by proactively presenting the right information to them at the right place, time, and context.

Microsoft Research Podcast: Building Contextually Intelligent Assistants with Dr. Paul Bennett

Paul Bennett