Having a personal assistant can be very helpful and even give you a sense of power that you've made it to the top in the business world. Well now you can have one with predictive mind-reading applications that serve as your assistant. Companies such as Google in Silicon Valley are designing robotic personal assistants that can better understand personal needs through many different user activities on mobile devices.

Your smartphone application will read your e-mail, scan your calendar, track your location and analyze traffic patterns, all to set your alarm to an earlier time, based on the fact that it will take you longer to get to your meeting that morning due to traffic conditions. The application has determined this need to set your alarm for an earlier time by learning all the above factors going on in your device without you directly having told your phone anything about your meeting. The engineers who built this technology say that the device sets the alarm to an earlier time based on your location, time of day and digital activity. Other functions that your digitalized assistant can help you with is sending you a message with weather updates in a city you will be traveling to in days to come, as well as letting you know when to leave for a dinner date all based on calendar events you have entered.

Some may say the notion of your smart phone sifting through your e-mails and tracking your location is quite creepy. Especially for the fact that your device is taking it upon itself to interrupt your sleep due to traffic conditions. However, these digitalized personal assistants will become mainstream according to technologists working on projects linked to Web Search.

The inundation of alerts and digital messages being sent to your smart phone may raise the perception of these semi-invasive applications to be deemed necessary. The applications can help to monitor when messages will be disruptive to your day such as when you are in a meeting. The application can scan your calendar events and know that you are in a meeting and will silence a phone call that you receive at that time. To get around the problem of not wanting to miss a call, for example from a sick child at home, the application can see that the person calling has called multiple times as well as has they same last name as you. As this technology surfaces it will be interesting to see the debate between usefulness and privacy concerns grows.