Today, I thought: Let’s see what virtual assistants, people working on a distance for others, thought of ‘their’ term by hijacked by the AI industry.

Interestingly enough, the very first reaction I got (through a direct message), made very clear that people from Europe are not aware AT ALL of the widely usage and acceptance of the term ‘virtual assistants’ in daily lives since decades!!.

Let me illustrate this by copying this from our virtual assistant synonym page:

Alternative usage of Virtual Assistants
The term Virtual Assistant (sometimes abbreviated to VA) is also used for human beings working remotely as independent entrepreneurs, highly skilled professionals, or someone else’s personal assistants (PA).

According to the International Virtual Assistants Association (IVAA) a Virtual Assistant (VA) is an independent entrepreneur providing administrative, creative and/or technical services. Utilizing advanced technological modes of communication and data delivery, a professional VA assists clients in his/her area of expertise from his/her own office on a contractual basis.

The Virtual Assistant industry is huge. In 2010, 65.59% of Virtual Assistants resided in the US, the number of VA’s in Canada was 9.98%, in U.K. 8.73%, in Australia 6.73%.Typing the term Virtual Assistant into a search engine brings you thousands of pages concerning Virtual Assistance industry – discussions, associations and organizations such as The International Virtual Assistants Association (IVAA), Virtual Assistant Chamber of Commerce or Virtual Assistant Networking Association (VANA).

The Virtual Assistant Chamber of Commerce conducts an annual survey Virtual Assistant Industry Statistics of the Virtual Assistant profession. The survey, comprised of 101 multiple-choice and free-form questions, is said to be the most in-depth, comprehensive and truly representative cross-section taken of the Virtual Assistant industry to date.

The Virtual Assistants industry also organizes conferences for remote workers. The best known events are: Online International Virtual Assistants Convention, Annual Online Virtual Assistant Summit, National Virtual Assistant Conference, Australian VA Conference (AVAC).

On the picture on our virtual assistants page, you can see how Google relates Virtual Assistants to other terms (using Google Wonder Wheel). Clearly NOT related to AI at all!!! This usage is very very dominant.

It clearly demonstrates that Virtual Assistant term is mostly associated with the alternative meaning instead of the meaning referred to the chatbot industry.

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I’ll forward this post to Twitter. Might help a bit….

Hm, maybe we could have asked that question a bit earlier
Chatbots.org is the Industry Catalyst for Intelligent Virtual Characters (chatbots, virtual agents or virtual assistants)

I don’t know how many posts I’ve deleted, and users I have banned, because I was unaware that the term was used to describe what I would deem to be “Remote Personal Assistants”. In fact, I’m afraid I removed what I had determined to be a spam post earlier today that fell into this exact category. Even after learning of this “unfortunate” alternate usage of the term, I still feel that posts that advertise for this sort of “virtual assistant” still falls into the category of spam, and unless I’m told otherwise, I’ll still continue to perform the same duties, though in the future I’ll add an expanded explanation that for this site a “virtual assistant” is a non-human entity.