Virtual assistants are a key component of smart devices and spaces. Such assistants help users access information and accomplish tasks. In this paper, a smart virtual assistant is presented. The goal of the assistant is to identify guests arriving at organizations, converse with the guests and respond to their inquiries. The assistant makes use of face recognition to identify guests and natural language understanding to interact with them. The novelty in the presented smart assistant comes from the automatic registration of guests. Once the organization invites a guest, the assistant is copied in the email. From the invitation email, the assistant applies natural language understanding to extract guest names and affiliations. Such information is then used to acquire an image for each guest from the Internet. The paper describes a working prototype of the smart virtual assistant, which was successfully tested against a set of real invitation emails used by the authors’ institutions.