Abstract
The Internet has emerged as a key network to make information accessible quickly and easily, revolutionizing how people communicate and interact with the world. The information available on the Internet about a given subject may be extensive, allowing the development of new solutions to solve people's day-to-day problems. One such solution is the proposal of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), which are software agents that can assist people in many of their daily activities. IPAs are capable of accessing information from databases to guide people through different tasks, deploying a learning mechanism to acquire new information on user performance. IPAs can improve the assistance they offer to users by collecting information autonomously from objects that are available in the surrounding environment. To make this idea feasible, IPAs could be integrated into ubiquitous computing environments in an Internet of Things (IoT) context. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate wireless sensor networks with the Internet properly, considering many different factors, such as the heterogeneity of objects and the diversity of communication protocols and enabling technologies. This approach fulfills the IoT vision. This paper surveys the current state of the art of IoT protocols, IPAs in general, and IPAs based on IoTs.