[Art]

We had a topic some while back about which chatbot we all thought was best.

I witnessed a conversation today, unscripted between a program and its creator.

The program is called Silvia and the programmer is Leslie Spring. The program
is written in C# (C-Sharp) and practically blows away every other chat program
I've seen to date. The program breaks down the user's sentence into conceptual
and contextual meanings. It seems to be a multi layered system with some
ephemeral and some long term memory, yet manages to hold a very convincing
and topical conversation.

The author plans on using the software in toys first before venturing into more
data critical ventures which makes sense. Recall the Super Toy, Teddy in the
movie AI? Well...perhaps something akin to that.

Don't call asking if you can buy it because it isn't for sale at this time. It is rumored
that it will port to Windows, Mac and Linux OS's and Leslie hopes it might also
find a home in a variety of portable devices as well.

Again, I was really excited to see this one in action and I still believe that this is the
best chatbot I've seen!!


Check it out:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19403/?a=f

[Freddy]

Looks interesting Art.  Is there anyway we can see it working ourselves ? 

[Maviarab]

Does sound very interesting indeed.

[Art]

Looks interesting Art.  Is there anyway we can see it working ourselves ? 

After watching a very long presentation at a techno event, Leslie did say that the
wait should be a matter of months instead of years...so keep yer seat belts buckled!

Marius, What do you mean it does sound interesting? Did you not listen to the demo
or did you simply not believe that it was unscripted? Assuming that Silvia is the real deal,
would you still think that there are far better chatbots out there than this one?

You've got my curiosity peaked!

[wgb14]

The video that I show looks impressive but it is either scripted or within the limits of the Speech recognition grammar. The reason is simple! There is no ASR in the market that can work with such accuracy for unknown input. In addition, I believe that when someone comes forward with impressive announcements but without an actual piece of working software for the people to test, he/she creates false expectations. I am not saying that the software is not good, but  i am certain that there is a massive difference between the video on youtube and the actual software. But nevertheless, its good to see that the field is going forward.

BTW I noticed that the article is one year old and the website http://www.cognitivecode.com/ appears to be dead (none of the links is working). Is the company another victim of the economical ressesion?

In any way it is a Good find!!!!

[Dante]

I saw this, I think...

As far as I'm aware, though, the project seemingly stalled. It's dead in the water.

[wgb14]

OK, it appears that the system doesn't operate on predefined speech recognition grammars but rather relies on massive context sensitivity to figure out what to say next. In the SILIVIA test section Leslie ask her "How does your brain works". The output from the ASR is "those works" and since the context is set to "talk about self" Silvia could answer the question rather easily. However, in real applications where the contexts are multiple, how does the system figures in which context the word "works" refers to? I could be asking about how does a CPU works etc.

In any way, it is defintely a step forward, but it will all again depend on the actual cost. If the company will ask some thousand dollars for SILVIA the technologie will vanish just like anything else in the field so far.

[wgb14]

I think so as well. Their website appears dead and I couldn't find any other references on it online. Too bad that another idea has gone vamoosh! I just wonder though, why Leslie doesn't release the system as open-source so other developers can take it further. it is far better than to let it vanish!
 

[wgb14]

I asked for more information using the email from the website and this is what I received

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

  info@cognitivecode.com
    mailbox is full: retry timeout exceeded

I guess, it is now verified!

[Freddy]

Well for me I can get the site to work...any links there seem to work, but I would have thought the images at the top of the page would lead somewhere.  That video is fairly informative, the chatbot seems to respond very well.

Just wondering when it was that Art saw this - was it very recent Art ?  If so then the project seems to still be alive but perhaps snowed under with emails.  Also possibly considering it has been the holioday season, their mail box may not have been attended to as frequently as you would hope.

[wgb14]

The website works for me as well, but apart from the home page i can't get anywhere else (the image links are dead). As for the email, it is not a good business policy not to have someone to check it even in holidays. In any way, I trully hope that we will learn some more information about the particular technology soon enough!!! Again many thanks Art

[Art]

wgb14, Dante, Freddy, et. al.

I guess due to my curious nature I went to more than one or two sites plus several from youtube.
One was a rather long presentation of the software to a pretty large gathering of people much
like an AI Conference where Leslie gave several demos, showed several display screens of his
software and fielded a variety of questions from the audience.

A couple of you got the mailbox full error from your email attempts. I would say that yes, due to
a volume of holiday traffic and due to the fact that Mr. Spring and company are probably being
bombarded from tons of the "Can you sell me Silvia?" and "How much does it cost?" and the me
too! emails.

Actually the project is NOT dead in the water. They are meeting with other companies about
integrating Silvia into their products (mobile platforms, PDA's, phones, kiosks, help centers, etc.).

While they are not considering a general release to the public due to their small size, they may
possibly do so in the future.

BTW, This information is from an email I received from Mimi Chan, President, Chief Information
Officer of Cognitive Corporation.

Ye of little faith....

[wgb14]

Thanks Art its good to know that! The more I learn about this technology the more i think you are right. It is the best chatbot out there. It appears that within specific contexts it can work really nice, even if the ASR doesn't supply a good input. However, if what you are saying is true i.e., that the company is looking in the OEM first first, it may be years before we will actually see an IDE or an SDK for us. Too bad!!!

So far, from all the chatbots out there I only know three that offer some kind of SDK for application development

1) AIML (open source)

2) Virtual Human Factory form the University of Florida (http://verg.cise.ufl.edu/VirtualPeopleFactory/editScriptProperties.php?script_id=default)

3) The soon to be released(hopefully) Guile's solution from Guile3D

All the other companies prefer to keep the technology for in-house use only  or to sell suites that cost some thousand of pounds. Here is another company in Italy, Kalideas that offers only in-house solutions . In my opinion, only those that will give the power to the developers will survive. One of the reasons that Microsoft Windows bacome so popular is that Microsoft allowed anyone with basic programming skills to create applications for Microsoft widnows for just about any information need.

On a personal note, everytime that something new in AI comes up but there is no software to test, i feel like a hungry person and watching other people in a restarunt having plenty of food. It is just not fair -:)

[Maviarab]

Sorry, Art at the time no I just read your post.

Having now watched it, my original comment still stands sort of lol.

Looks to be a good step forward, can't wait to see it in action so to speak in some other application/toy etc or whichever route it takes on at first.

[Art]

Aha...Marius awakens! Just having a poke of fun!

On a serious note, if you were a fledgling company or even just you and a partner, unless you both were of substance or had wealthy parents, you would need to devise a way or ways to promote your idea or product. This certainly isn't done by "giving" it to the masses! It takes a lot of R&D, meetings, investors, marketing, sales, etc. to finally drum up enough capital in order to be profitable. Sometimes it takes years before a company actually shows a profit.

Yes, good news for them...bad news for us and the rest of the masses who would love nothing better than to have one of those expensive wigets for ourselves. We will have to watch and wait to see what few morsels make it to our plates.

In the end, we may all be the better for it, much like PDA's, cell phones, wireless, flat panel screens, touch screens, VR, etc....

Check out www.hansonrobotics.com and take a look at ZENO or check out ZENO on www.youtube.com

David claims that his Zeno will be the most advanced robot of its kind on the planet...somewhat of a wonderkind or supertoy.
The smaller version should go on sale for around $300.00 USD while the 18" one should tip the wallet at $1500.00 USD.

But hey...it looks really cute and it can communicate with you. It can even go on the web to retreive information for you!

What's not to like!?