Open Source Digital Assistant Looks to Take on Siri and Google Now

 Artificial Intelligence  

Sirius, developed by University of Michigan engineering researchers, is similar to Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Google Now but is open source. It also features an image recognition function.

S oftware startups like Ainova have been working to develop their own digital assistants, but none has yet been able to challenge Apple, Google, or Microsoft. But, with the arrival of Sirius, that could change. Digital assistants on mobile devices have allowed people to get answers and perform functions on their devices simply by speaking.

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Now, researchers from the University of Michigan have announced Sirius at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) in Turkey.

Sirius is an open end-to-end standalone speech and vision based intelligent personal assistant (IPA) service similar to Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Echo. Sirius implements the core functionalities of an IPA including speech recognition, image matching, natural language processing and a question-and-answer system.

The researchers have developed a “representative of production grade systems.” Indeed, the speech recognition component of Sirius incorporates deep learning, the trend dominating artificial intelligence development today.  The technology uses deep neural networks that are trained on big data and then makes inferences about new data based on what the system already knows.

"Instead of making an app to run on the Apple Watch, for example, maybe I could make my own watch. We're very excited to see what the world comes together to build and learn with Sirius."

Sirius also shown up on the Product Hunt web forum and is available from GitHub.

Sirius accepts questions and commands from a mobile device, processes information on servers, and provides audible responses on the mobile device.

Jason Mars, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, says, "What we've created with Sirius is like what Linux is to Windows." With a Windows controlled computer, the user doesn't have access to change the system, but Linux allows open source changes.

"Now the core technology is out of the bag, and we all have access to it," Mars said. "Instead of making an app to run on the Apple Watch, for example, maybe I could make my own watch. We're very excited to see what the world comes together to build and learn with Sirius as a starting point."





SOURCE  University of Michigan

By 33rd Square

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