DARPA Builds Smarter Version of Microsoft's Clippy 140
holy_calamity writes "Microsoft's animated paperclip may be long dead, but a $150m DARPA project has resurrected the idea of a virtual assistant. AI researchers from more than 60 institutions worked on the project entitled CALO. CALO is designed to help ease the bureaucratic burden of the military. A consumer spinoff, Siri, is coming to the iPhone later this year. It responds to conversational voice commands to take over multi-step tasks like choosing and booking restaurants or cabs."
Siri is kinda cool (Score:4, Informative)
These guys briefed at a company meeting the other day and offered a private beta to those of us with i-phones. Their tool allows you to submit natural language queries for things that involve transactions. You can tell your Siri enabled phone to order you a pineapple pizza and it will find pizza restaurants with web ordering API's and then show you the prices for what you asked for and offer to let you buy them. In the case of pizza during the demo, it showed pizza Hut and Dominoes. They're working towards an interface that would allow you to say "Book me on the next flight to chicago!" You can tell siri, "Get me a copy of $bookname" and it will search amazon and other services with buy online API's and offer to purchase the book for you.
The bottom line to me is that it looked powerful and scary at the same time. It most definitely isn't clippy.
Re:Is it time yet... (Score:3, Informative)
When it gets that bad, I don't care who see's what I'm doing!
The only time I ever had a problem finding a place to 'go', I was on a very long bridge.