SkyPhrase Aims To Understand You Better Than Siri

 
Artificial Intelligence

SkyPhrase is a new natural language interface that looks to be better at getting what you want than Apple's Siri.  Developed by Nick Cassimatis and colleagues from the Rensselar Polytechnic Institute, SkyPhrase can currently search through applications like email and Twitter based on complex searches.

C ognitive science professor Nick Cassimatis at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute thinks all these big companies are doing natural language search wrong, and he and two grad students have built their own set of tools — and a start-up called SkyPhrase — to attempt to be better than the likes of Siri. The SkyPhrase app searches Gmail, Twitter and Orbitz, through its own Web site, Chrome extension and iPhone app.

SkyPhrase searches through email for attachments with a query like “emails that Bill sent me during the holidays containing pictures,” do complex Twitter searches like “tweets about Mars from NASA during the last two days,” and finds airline tickets with flexible dates like “flights from Philadelphia to London leaving next week and returning in April.”

Cassimatis, worked on his PhD in artificial intelligence in Marvin Minky's group at the MIT Media Lab, says the SkyPhrase approach is more precise because it is better linguistically informed than others.  Today, except for some very simple scenarios, computing devices do not understand human language, and so we are stuck with cumbersome web applications, limited and sometimes even dangerous smartphone interfaces, and insights that go undiscovered because so much data inside organizations and laboratories is difficult and expensive to analyze.

“We memorize the dictionary to read the Library of Congress,” he said. “Siri is trying to memorize the Library of Congress.” SkyPhrase is built to understand complex queries and syntactical relationships, not just keywords and commands. It can interpret conjunctions, coordinative clauses and noun phrases."

Noam Chomsky has recently been critical of how researchers are tackling AI, and proposes better linguistic strategies.  It appears that Cassimatis is implementing this strategy to some degree.

Despite an impressive beginning  there still is a lot of work to be done. The company — which has raised some seed funding and also accepts PayPal donations on its site — sells its Gmail search app for the iPhone for $0.99.

The app for email does not search within the contents of emails or users’ contact lists, but understands subject lines, sender names, times and attachment types and a free mobile Web version is coming soon, Cassimatis said. He also plans to license a SkyPhrase API which will allow other services to tie into the SkyPhrase code base. —


SOURCE  All Things D

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