To My Assistant

Compiles everything that disgruntled and optimistic assistants everywhere promise never to do when, one day, they have assistants of their own.

The Assistant by Robert Walser--who was admired greatly by Kafka, Musil, Walter Benjamin, and W. G. Sebald--is now presented in English for the very first time.

From the Hollywood assistant trenches, a hilarious guide to surviving life at the bottom of the totem pole. I will not make you sort my M&Ms by color. I will not take off four hours in the middle of the day to go shopping and then announce upon my return that “it’s going to be a late one—we need to catch up!” I will not request that you create and maintain my online dating profile. Welcome to the wickedly funny world of To My Assistant, where overworked and underappreciated assistants finally get their due. We’ve all been there. You might even be there right now. Do you depend upon your college education to handle crucial business decisions such as memorizing your boss’ lunch order, trying to schedule four meetings where only one can go, and helping your boss detag Facebook photos? Or what about those awesome days when you’re instructed to “send me that thing from a week ago,” “call that guy I wanted to call,” or “book me a table at that restaurant that girl said was really good,” and are then berated when you’re not able to figure out immediately what your boss is talking about? To My Assistant compiles everything that disgruntled and optimistic assistants everywhere promise NEVER TO DO when, one day, they have assistants of their own. From ridiculous requests and backhanded compliments to outright insults, and complete with helpful tips and tricks for Boss Wrangling—like what you can learn about your boss’s mood from his meal choices, how to navigate such professional minefields as requests for your opinion and interactions with your boss’s children and pets, and advanced translation techniques for incoherent e-mails and text messages—these pages are just what the underpaid masses need to survive (and laugh at) the daily injustices of life at the bottom of the totem pole.

She liked a celebrity named Lin Gang, and she was the most talented of them all. In the end, she became Lin Gang's assistant, and thus had a deeper relationship with Lin Gang. Even though her family disagreed, she still persevered."Finally, the power of love infected the people of Family, and blessings were given to happiness."

Assistant, you are a leader. As an assistant, you constantly face obstacles that hold you back from accomplishing your career goals. Whether it’s a job change, shifting deadlines, a micromanaging executive, a toxic co-worker, a high-pressure project, or an intense negotiation with a vendor, the administrative profession is not for the faint of heart. If you’re looking to maintain the status quo and be “just an assistant,” this book is not for you. But, if you want the confidence and ability to conquer the challenges that most try to avoid, then you’re in the right place. The Leader Assistant outlines four pillars—embody the characteristics, employ the tactics, engage in relationships, and exercise self-care—that will help you rediscover your passion for the profession and become a confident, future-proof, game-changing Leader Assistant. If you neglect even one pillar, you’ll head for burnout, stagnation, and anonymity. You are meant for so much more. Are you ready to be the Leader Assistant the world needs?

The Assistant, Bernard Malamud's second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who "wants better" for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store. Like Malamud's best stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. Malamud defined the immigrant experience in a way that has proven vital for several generations of writers. "His best novel . . . The Assistant is as tightly written as a prose poem." --Morris Dickstein in Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945-1970

The personal assistant, the decathlon, was easy to handle, but shy in front of her: I, I'm your little fan. The haughty queen, a famous model in the industry, cold as ice and frost, yet she chose to eat the soft side rather than the hard side! The assistant poked her in the back and made a fool of herself, swearing to get the queen in her hands. Easily humorous, a different kind of warm love!

An accessible explanation of the technologies that enable such popular voice-interactive applications as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. Have you talked to a machine lately? Asked Alexa to play a song, asked Siri to call a friend, asked Google Assistant to make a shopping list? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a nontechnical and accessible explanation of the technologies that enable these popular devices. Roberto Pieraccini, drawing on more than thirty years of experience at companies including Bell Labs, IBM, and Google, describes the developments in such fields as artificial intelligence, machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language understanding that allow us to outsource tasks to our ubiquitous virtual assistants. Pieraccini describes the software components that enable spoken communication between humans and computers, and explains why it's so difficult to build machines that understand humans. He explains speech recognition technology; problems in extracting meaning from utterances in order to execute a request; language and speech generation; the dialog manager module; and interactions with social assistants and robots. Finally, he considers the next big challenge in the development of virtual assistants: building in more intelligence--enabling them to do more than communicate in natural language and endowing them with the capacity to know us better, predict our needs more accurately, and perform complex tasks with ease.