Processing of commands in a virtual assistant

A virtual assistant uses context information to supplement natural language or ges tural input from a user. Context helps to clarify the user's intent and to reduce the num ber of candidate interpretations of the user's input, and reduces the need for the user to provide excessive clarification input. Context can include any available information that is usable by the assistant to supplement explicit user input to constrain an information processing problem and/or to personalize results. Context can be used to constrain solu tions during various phases of processing, including, for example, speech recognition, natural language processing, task flow processing, and dialog generation.