Putting free digital assistants to the test
Friend and Helper
© Lead Image © iofoto, 123RF.com
Researchers from the University of Michigan have built an intelligent personal assistant akin to Siri and Cortana from free components. Although the Sirius Project focuses on the server load created by digital assistant software, we are interested in the usability of Sirius and its successor Lucida.
What does the chief engineer of a spaceship in the 23rd century do to operate a computer from the 20th century? He picks up the mouse and says, "Hello, computer" (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Paramount Pictures, 1986). During his journey through time, Montgomery "Scotty" Scott nonetheless had to hit the keys eventually.
Owners of modern smartphones, on the other hand, can go a long way with OK, Google, Hey, Siri, or Hey, Cortana; the speech assistants understand many questions or instructions formulated in everyday language. You can only guess how many algorithms are behind the proprietary marvels.
Things are quite different with the open source intelligent personal assistant Sirius [1], which was developed in 2015 by the research group Clarity Lab at the University of Michigan [2]. The software, published under the BSD license, bundles together the free speech recognition systems CMU Sphinx [3] (PocketSphinx and Sphinx4), Kaldi [4], image recognition based on OpenCV [5], the question-answering system OpenEphyra [6], and UC Berkley's deep learning framework Caffe [7]. A Wikipedia dump forms the basis for OpenEphyra's data corpus. With aid from all of these components, Sirius is in a position to answer typed or spoken questions and to recognize objects in images (Figure 1).
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