The Sirius Personal Assistant is open source and has been created with the intention of providing a platform for other companies to implement this technology.
Personal assistants are dominated by Siri, Google Now and Cortana. They are developments that until now could only be allowed companies of the stature of Apple, Google and Microsoft, due to the complexity of the technology and the intensive use of resources in the cloud that these services need to do. However, the Sirius project – whose name has been put in clear reference to the Apple platform-has been carried out in the University of Michigan using open source.
The idea was to create a platform that could be used by other companies, whether device manufacturers or software developers, in order to create your own intelligent personal assistants. It is a way of breaking the oligopoly that exists around this technology, whose development it is only allowed to companies with a large amount of resources at your disposal.
In this case it has been a team of researchers from the University of Michigan who has built the personal assistant Sirius and has decided to base it on open source. The service has features of an IPA (intelligent personal assitant), including voice recognition – for which you need access to a database in the cloud– and associated capabilities, such as natural language processing. The latter technology allows the system to recognize the meaning of a command, even if the way it is expressed varies.
The Sirius Personal Assistant also has a question and answer systemable to extract precise information to answer certain questions. The ability to visual content analysis it is also implemented in the service, allowing you to identify images. All these functionalities are associated with technologies related to artificial intelligence, such as ‘deep learning‘, which uses complex algorithms to understand large databases and to be able to intersect information with new databases.
The project has been carried out specifically in the Clarity Lab of the University of Michigan and has already been presented in public, which means that the open source community you already have access to the source code. While it is true that it is not the first initiative aimed at competing with the Siri or Cortana, Sirius has a more technologically sound design than other services, such as Jasper or JuliusJS.
The creators of the personal assistant have carefully examined what are the best types of server chips that can support workloads like those carried out by Sirius. It’s about optimizing the system’s capabilities to the fullest to achieve the best performance.
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