"Virtual assistant" has meant a lot of different things over the last decade - a voice command on a phone, a scripted chat widget on a website, and now, increasingly, a visual, talking avatar that can hold a real conversation. It's worth being precise about what's actually changed.
The earliest mainstream virtual assistants were command interfaces with a friendly name attached - set a timer, play a song, check the weather. They were reactive and narrow: useful for short, well-defined requests, poor at anything open-ended.
Text-based virtual assistants brought AI into customer service and support - a chat widget that could answer common questions and hand off to a human when it got stuck. Better than a phone queue, but still a fairly flat, transactional experience.
Today's virtual assistants can be built as digital humans - animated, voice-driven avatars powered by an LLM, capable of holding a genuine conversation rather than following a script. The difference isn't just visual polish; it changes what the assistant can be used for:
If you're evaluating options, a few things are worth checking before you commit:
Trulience is built around the idea that the avatar layer and the AI layer should be separate: plug in whichever LLM suits your use case, then use the interactive avatar creator to build a multilingual, embeddable virtual assistant around it - without needing to rebuild everything if you change AI providers later.