Reference model of next-generation digital personal assistant: integrating proactive behavior

Digital personal assistants such as Apple's Siri or Google Assistant emerge and penetrate our everyday lives, acting as digital helper for searching information or executing simple tasks. However, with their primarily reactive behavior through conversational input current assistants are rather limited in their support. This paper proposes a novel reference model of next-generation digital personal assistants which integrates the user's goals and a proactive behavior of support to achieve these goals. We report the findings of our focus group discussion with 11 researchers to develop and substantiate our model as well as identify common areas of human-centered assistance, namely mental, physical, activity, environment, social, and technology support. We further show and discuss important research challenges of next-generation assistants. Using our proposed reference model, researchers in the community can now design and classify their future personal assistants.