A better virtual friend

I have been thinking about a better virtual friend. I have been playing with intelligent digital assistant and chat bot apps and they don't really work.  Too often inane and incompetent.

This is not to deny that their text to speech is impressive and that avatar animation is often a joy to behold. The problem is that the systems don't know enough. Their domain knowledge is poor and they're not smart enough to leverage Google and Wikipedia. Most damningly, they don't know how to model you, the user.

So here is what I'm thinking. A system with a simple automated theorem prover at its heart. Distinct sets of propositions (wffs) associated with you (your beliefs) and those of people you know. An ISA ontology and a database of common-sense inference rules.  Self-customising through conversational interaction with your good self. (Learning is as important as inference in the design of intelligent systems.) No purity hangups with first order predicate calculus.

Not wishing to spend a year learning Java,  I'm inclined to prototype some ideas in Python.

Now, where do I go to review a decent unification algorithm?

My new digital personal assistant for android

During the summer we will be driving around France. I imagine a hi-tech car park where you have to do something smart with your phone to pay for parking. What a hassle! Wouldn't it be nice to have a smart PA system on your phone which could just sort the details on your behalf. This would need a common interface standard: I wonder whether Google and Apple (Siri) could get together? Then I thought: Google? Do they even have a personal assistant?

Yes.

I have downloaded the recommended system to my phone and will shortly join that eccentric crew who talk to their phones with no-one at the other end. What ever next - "Hey Glass"?

Continued: chatbots


Talking Angela (above after skipping the ad) seemed the most polished of the smartphone chat bots, with its fancy avatar (a cat, Angela, in Paris) and its voice input/output. It installs easily enough on my phone but is a disappointment. It's a free app and makes its money by continually steering the conversation into money-making opportunities. Ask Angela to sing and a music-video type screen open up with some cute graphics and a prominent banner "buy this song"; try to focus the conversation onto your own problems in life and Angela will solicit a 'present' for a 'friend' of hers: it'll cost you.

As Lord Sugar would say, my search goes on ...

UPDATE: Tuesday June 18th 2013

Talking Angela (perhaps we should call her grasping and avaricious Angela) didn't last long: within 24 hours she was uninstalled. The Google 'speaktoit' assistant made it through to this morning when I was offered a 'Daily Briefing' notification - when I tapped it, the avatar started briefing me in loudspeaker mode and an american accent - I was sitting in a crowded doctor's waiting room at the time. She got uninstalled in ninety seconds! To be fair, she was pretty incompetent answering queries: not at all a replacement for Google web search.