Verbal OS
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Verbal OS |
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A beta version of the Java-based operating system that blends several AI technologies to enable more seamless human-computer interaction.
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AI is a big topic these days. It all started on June 29, 2001, when Steven Spielberg launched his new movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Several companies made use of the media hype to promote their new products and services, although the cutting edge technology at the beginning of the 21st century cannot produce android boys or other movie miracles. However, one of the recent press releases caught my attention, because it describes an universal, extensible AI operating system that could be used in variety of real-world situation regardless of the hardware and software platform.
Verbal Operating System was an early dream of Michael Rice, the Natural Machine founder and owner. After two years and 6 complete rewrites in languages like C++ and Visual Basic he finally settled on Java. Today, his company is focusing on completing development of its voice recognition technology - a core service of the production release of the software, scheduled for late Summer 2001. They released its first beta release on the same day that Spielberg launched his movie. While your guide wasn't at the premiere, he was one of the first to download the beta version.
According to the documentation, this product breaks the traditional paradigm of today's operating systems by allowing users to have a natural conversation with their digital lives using spoken language. Since it is written in Java, it can run on on top of your current Windows, Linux, Solaris, or Macintosh desktop, on Verbal Devices (which are still under development), or through the telephone. In a nutshell, Verbal should provide an open platform for developing interactive applications that use Natural Language Processing (NLP), Voice Recognition (VR), Text To Speech (TTS), and similar technologies. Contrary to some specialized products that are restricted to a specific knowledge domain, Verbal OS promises to grow and match the user's needs by simply installing the additional packages.
Unfortunately, this beta version doesn't show the full potential and versatility described in technical documentation. It ships with only one demo application, and after several questions and answers quickly exhausts its repertoire, starting to behave like a simple chatterbot. In their own words, a conversation with your computer runs the risk of being a boring conversation. Verbal solves this by using its Personality and Free Will Engine to liven up your conversation and adding that important spark of creativity and spontaneity to your conversations. Again, these features are not available at this time, so our conversation with Verbal's pizza delivery boy quickly became boring.
Natural Machine is aiming high with their first product (especially considering the task of building compatible hardware devices), and I'm eager to see the final release. A brief look at the fragments of technical documentation reveals an event model with a rich set of user events, allowing developers to leverage their existing Java, XML and OOP experience. Key concepts, cells and activators, are intuitive and easy to understand: I hope that the rest of the package continues in the same manner, as it could provide a solid foundation for such unique product. End users will have to wait for their chance "to get a glimpse of the future of computing", but stay tuned for more news: in just a few months we could have a potential breakthrough in the area of human-computer interaction.