Remember this bad ass?

Maybe, if you're old enough. You might have found it annoying because of the following:-

• You're too skillful and don't need an assistant.
• Paperclip doesn't learn and optimize itself to suit your style and natural workflow.
• You don't know what you want to do.
• You don't know how to make use of the assistant.
• The technology back then was crappy and not conducive for great UI / UX implementations.

---

Virtual assistants, two decades after!

Take a look at Cortana, Siri, Google Now, Alexa, and so many more. These are perpetually learning bots, attempting to thrive on big data and user inputs. There are also human-based virtual assistants like Supahands. Virtual Assistants (VAs) are becoming more hybridized nowadays with a mix of both automation and human cognition.

What's getting better?

• User experience and user interface has made great progress, thanks to advances in design philosophy and technological support.
• Usage is becoming more like second nature. Still not very awesome, but VAs are getting more intuitive to use. This is mainly caused by the advances in machine learning and personalization algorithms.
• Goal setting / gamification. This is usually not a feature of standard VAs, but close enough. It's a paradigm that has been in continuous improvement ever since achievements become the gaming industry's standard. It's a practice that's seeping into non-gaming industries, and there's plenty to learn here.

The common design decision.

Virtual assistants are faceless these days. You only see their texts, or hear their voices. While this is not necessarily the only design decision that should be adopted, UI / UX designers should make note that if the virtual assistant has physical appearance, it's best to provide the option to make it invisible (or disappear altogether).

---

So how do we design the best virtual assistant?

There's no exact science to this, of course. We're still in the frontiers of experimental VAs. However (you've guessed it), Steemit presents several unique features that may revolutionize VAs. While it's too much to expect VAs to solve all of our life problems, I think the Steemit VA solution as something that augments / improves the livelihood of its users is something that's incredibly valuable.

Given the economic incentives around here, I think this Steemit has already disrupted platforms like Supahands. And that's based on that business perspective alone. Maybe it's unfair to compare a voluntary community to a dedicated VA community, but I think the concept can be made lightyears better than anything out there once formalized as an application.

But before that, onboarding and a generalized VA should be implemented. There are plenty of articles on Steemit that has already expressed onboarding and persistent gamification as necessary implementations. I thought @cryptoctopus's recent article is a pretty good (and short) read about it.

Some sort of community management effort is really needed at the moment. We have lots of enthusiastic brains here, but no great way to conveniently group up ongoing discussions. Maybe there are too many ways to do it. Maybe in the future, a hybridized virtual assistant will point me to the right direction, on demand. Or maybe, all you need to do is post up something reasonable enough for the community to help out :)

---

Oh, by the way. Do you know we have a mascot?

Officially recognized or not, @kyriacos once designed a pretty good looking mascot for Steemit called Steemy. You can check it out here: https://steemit.com/art/@kyriacos/the-making-of-steemy-mascot-competition

Will this become Steemit's clippy?

---

Follow me @kevinwong