Now, a Intelligent Software Assistant that acts as a personal aide and handles a lot of the menial tasks
New Delhi February 23, 2009
Search is the gateway to the Internet for most people; for many of us, it has become second nature to distill a task into a set of keywords that will lead to the required tools and information. But Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Silicon Valley startup Siri, envisions a new way for people to interact with the services available on the Internet: a “do engine” rather than a search engine.
Siri is working on virtual personal-assistant software, which would help users complete tasks rather than just collect information. The software takes the user’s context into account, making it highly useful and flexible, according to an article in the inaugural issue of Technology Review India to be unveiled by leading policy maker Prof MGK Menon at the emerging technologies conclave next week.
In order to get a system that can act and reason, a system that can interact and understand is needed. The Intelligent Software Assistant owes its origins to a US artificial-intelligence project called CALO, for “cognitive assistant that learns and organizes,” located at the research institute SRI International.
The project’s leaders combined traditionally isolated approaches to artificial intelligence to try to create a personal-assistant program that improves by interacting with its user, says the 109-year old Technology Review magazine that is considered as the authority on the future of technology.
The initial version, to be released this year, will be aimed at mobile users and will perform only specific types of functions, such as helping make reservations at restaurants, check flight status, or plan weekend activities. Users can type or speak commands in casual sentences, and the software deciphers their intent from the context.
Siri is connected to multiple online services, so a quick interaction with it can accomplish several small tasks that would normally require visits to a number of web-sites. For example, a user can ask Siri to find a mid priced Chinese restaurant in a specific part of town and make a reservation there.
Recent improvements in computer processor power have been essential in bringing this level of sophistication to a consumer product.
But the growing power of mobile phones and the increasing speed of networks make it possible to handle some of the processing at Siri’s headquarters and pipe the results back
to users, allowing the software to take on tasks that just couldn’t be done before. “Search does what search does very well, and that’s not going anywhere anytime soon,” says Dag Kittlaus, Siri’s cofounder and CEO. “[But] we believe that in five years, everyone’s going to have a virtual assistant to which they delegate a lot of the menial tasks.”
While the software will be intelligent and useful, the company has no aspiration to make it seem human. “We think that we can create an incredible experience that will help you be more efficient in your life, in solving problems and the tasks that you do,” Cheyer says. But Siri is always going to be just a tool, not a rival to human intelligence.
The EmTech conclave hopes to debate subjects like green transportation, future of bandwidth and connectivity, green architecture and urban planning and India as a innovation hub with over 500 participants from all fields.
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