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
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.
-
So Long, ArcoLinux
The ArcoLinux distribution is the latest Linux distribution to shut down.