Abstract: A personal assistant system and method. A personal assistant electronic device receives input data indicative of a query specifying a request from a user within an environment. A context processing engine establishes a context for the query, the engine applying trained models to the input data to identify personal and environmental cues associated with the query. A response generator generates a response message based on the request, the query context and a response profile for the user, the response profile specifying one or more preferences for the user, each of the one or more preferences being associated with a manner in which the response generator responds to requests from the user, each of the one or more preferences being set by the response generator in response to feedback from the user to previous response messages.