Intelligent personal assistants: A systematic literature review

•We review the state-of-the-art in Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA).•We propose a taxonomy of IPA, detailing challenges and goals.•The methodology consisted in a systematic literature review of the area.•We identified gaps and trends, pointing out usage, security and privacy issue.•We found a gap in voice interactive IPA solutions on education and health domains. Natural Language Interfaces allow human-computer interaction through the translation of human intention into devices’ control commands, analyzing the user’s speech or gestures. This novel interaction mode arises from advancements of artificial intelligence, expert systems, speech recognition, semantic web, dialog systems, and natural language processing, bringing the concept of Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA). There is currently a vast literature on this subject. However, in the best of our knowledge, there is no thorough analysis of the state-of-the-art in the field. In this context, we present in this article a survey of the field, discussing the main trends, critical areas, and challenges of an IPA. Another contribution is the proposition of a taxonomy for IPA classification. The method used to achieve these objectives consisted of a systematic literature review based on the population, intervention, comparison, outcome, and context (PICOC) criteria. As a result, we started from more than 3472 scientific articles published in the last six years, searched on a set of databases chosen to increase the probability of finding highly relevant articles. The review selected the 58 most significant articles, identifying challenges and open questions. We also discuss in the article the current status, usage, security and privacy issues, types, and architectures regarding an IPA. We conclude that usability, security, and privacy directly affect the confidence of the user in adopting an IPA.