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).
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for two weeks.
-
RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.
-
Happy Birthday, Linux
On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
-
VirtualBox 7.2 Has Arrived
With early support for Linux kernel 6.17 and other new additions, VirtualBox 7.2 is a must-update for users.
-
Linux Mint 22.2 Beta Available for Testing
Some interesting new additions and improvements are coming to Linux Mint. Check out the Linux Mint 22.2 Beta to give it a test run.
-
Debian 13.0 Officially Released
After two years of development, the latest iteration of Debian is now available with plenty of under-the-hood improvements.
-
Upcoming Changes for MXLinux
MXLinux 25 has plenty in store to please all types of users.
-
A New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle, a Linux AI assistant, works with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.