Researchers just built a free, open-source version of Siri by Jordan Norvet.
From the post:
Major tech companies like Apple and Microsoft have been able to provide millions of people with personal digital assistants on mobile devices, allowing people to do things like set alarms or get answers to questions simply by speaking. Now, other companies can implement their own versions, using new open-source software called Sirius — an allusion, of course, to Apple’s Siri.
Today researchers from the University of Michigan are giving presentations on Sirius at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems in Turkey. Meanwhile, Sirius also made an appearance on Product Hunt this morning.
“Sirius … implements the core functionalities of an IPA (intelligent personal assistant) such as speech recognition, image matching, natural language processing and a question-and-answer system,” the researchers wrote in a new academic paper documenting their work. The system accepts questions and commands from a mobile device, processes information on servers, and provides audible responses on the mobile device.
…
Read the full academic paper (PDF) to learn more about Sirius. Find Sirius on GitHub here.
…
Opens up the possibility of a IPA (intelligent personal assistant) that has custom intelligence. Are your day-to-day tasks Apple cookie-cutter tasks or do they go beyond that?
The security implications are interesting as well. What if your IPA “reads” on a news stream that you have been arrested? Or if you fail to check in within some time window?
I first saw this in a tweet by Data Geek.