"personal assistants" entries

Four short links: 17 March 2015

Four short links: 17 March 2015

Open Source Personal Assistant, Flintstoning Robots, Year of Personal Assistants, and Infrastructure Curiosity

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 17, 2015
  1. Sirius — UMich open source “intelligent Personal Assistant” (aka Siri, Cortana, Google Now, etc.). Text recognition, image recognition, query processing components. They hope it’ll be a focal point for research in the area, the way that open source operating systems have focused university research.
  2. MIT DragonBot Evolving to Teach Kids (IEEE Spectrum) — they’re moving from “Wizard of Oz” (humans-behind-the-scenes) control to autonomous operation. Lovely example of Flintstoning in a robotics context.
  3. Personal Assistants Coming (Robohub) — 2015 is the year physical products will be coming to market and available for experimentation and testing. Pepper ships in the summer in Japan, JIBO ships preorders in Q3, as does Cubic in the fall and EmoSpark in the summer. […]The key to the outcome of this race is whether a general purpose AI will be able to steer people through their digital world, or whether users would rather navigate to applications that are specialists (such as American Airlines or Dominos Pizza).
  4. Incuriosity Killed the Infrastructure — being actively curious about “fishy” things will lead to a more stable and happy infrastructure.