Shouldn’t your computer know a reasonable amount about your likes and dislikes? Wouldn’t it be great if it could anticipate your needs and take action without you pressing a key?
Booking travel and restaurant reservations, rearranging meeting schedules or even taking a first cut at reading e-mail messages are among the mundane tasks that have remained beyond the reach of our PCs for decades.
But a new generation of Internet technologies, coupled with the investment of more than a third of a billion dollars, may be making meaningful progress.
The concept of a software personal assistant has long captured the imagination of a generation of science fiction writers and computer scientists. Oliver Selfridge, the artificial-intelligence pioneer who died this month, is credited with coining the term “intelligent agent,” as well as the idea of a computer software “demon” — a simple software program that could monitor its environment and make appropriate responses when changes occur.
With the arrival of personal computing in the 1980s, the idea took the form of highly choreographed “vision” statements from many Silicon Valley companies. The most memorable was the Knowledge Navigator video, by John Sculley, then chief executive of Apple, in which an interactive assistant on a video display, clad in a bow tie, does research for a college professor and nags him to return his mother’s phone call. But efforts to build useful computerized assistants have consistently ended in failure.
Now, a Pentagon research project and two Silicon Valley start-up companies are about to try again.
SRI International, a research group in Menlo Park, California, is approaching the end of a multiyear project called CALO, which stands for cognitive assistant that learns and organizes. CALO is financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense and is one of the largest artificial-intelligence projects ever….