>> Georgia Tech’s Artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistant (AVA) lab is focused on research behind next-generation virtual assistants. We revisit assumptions regarding every aspect of modern AVAs – human-computer interaction design, single vs multimodal interactions, situated interactions over screens and mixed reality (AR/VR), task-oriented conversations to open-domain chit-chat to both, explicit to implicit (commonsense) knowledge-driven conversations, and higher level inference and reasoning.