Application of Virtual Assistants in Education: A Bibliometric Analysis in WOS Using CiteSpace

Virtual assistants, are helping us in different aspects of education, life, and entertainment as technology evolves and continues to change our daily lives. The rise of online teaching and learning in the epidemic era has driven the emergence of virtual teaching assistant hotspots, and the exploration of their technology has slowly expanded towards interaction, image, and emotion.This paper conducted a scientometric analysis using 221 academic papers related to virtual teaching assistants and education in the citation space between 1998 and 2022 to identify and visualize research hotspots, global trends and directions, etc. The results show a rapid increase in the number of publications on this topic in the last five years and a growing interdisciplinary research topic, with the most productive country in this field being the United States, but so far the theoretical research on virtual teacher assistants is not deep and comprehensive enough. In this paper, we identify the need and importance of virtual assistant research in the context of existing research in the fields of education, computer science, and psychology, and inform the design and production of future virtual teacher assistants.