The What and How of Smart Personal Assistants: Principles and Application Domains for IS Research

Digitization brings new possibilities to ease our daily life activities by the means of assistive technology. Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Samsung Bixby, to name only a few, heralded the age of smart personal assistants (SPAs), personified agents that combine artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing and various actuation mechanisms to sense and influence the environment. However, SPA research seems to be highly fragmented among different disciplines, such as computer science, human-computer-interaction and information systems, which leads to ‘reinventing the wheel approaches’ and thus impede progress and conceptual clarity. In this paper, we present an exhaustive, integrative literature review to build a solid basis for future research. We have identified five functional principles and three research domains which appear promising for future research, especially in the information systems field. Hence, we contribute by providing a consolidated, integrated view on prior research and lay the foundation for an SPA classification scheme.