After watching the film I had gained somewhat of an unhealthy obsession with artificial intelligence. I trawled website after website looking for my ‘Samantha’. Of course I came across the likes of IBM’s Watson, but that sort of technology won’t be released to the general public any time soon. However, I did stumble across a couple of projects that are in the pipeline and should be released later this year. Making sure that it doesn’t get left behind in the virtual assistant race with Apple and Google, Nuance, the company I mentioned earlier, is working on a project codenamed Wintermute. Nuance wants to make personal assistants, well, truly personal. It wants to save individual user profiles in the cloud so that whatever device you use, your assistant will always be there. The demo I watched on Engadget shows the application performing basic tasks such as listening to music and showing
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sports scores, but also adds in snippets of its own personality, relying on your profile information to offer clever quips that relate to you. It also understands conversational commands. Because the application will run across all of your devices, the program understands when you are using a different device. So for example, if you say “play that song I was listening to earlier” to your TV, it will understand that you were listening to a specific song on your smartphone or computer and continue playback right where you left off.
The user profiles will be detailed enough to allow you to say “throw on the game”, as shown in the demo. That’s pretty clever. The project is still very much in the early stages but will hopefully be hitting shelves either later this year or early 2015.
phonica magazine uk