Menlo Park-based SRI International, the company that created Apple's Siri, is currently developing a next-generation intelligent assistant. The project dubbed as Bright is said to know what a user wants before even asking for it.
Bright is meant to unload workers dealing with very stressful situations such as those in emergency response and network security. While it is currently aimed at doing very complicated work in helping save systems from virus attacks and helping emergency medical services deploy more help, the Bright intelligent assistant may end up in smartphones and tablets in the future.
Bright is not the first assistant software to predict what users want. Google Now for Android devices try to do it by making use of browsing history and location data. However, Bright wants to achieve more sophisticated functionality.
According to a report on MIT Technology Review, Bright is currently working on its skills of indexing data and learning to relate each data so it can predict what must be done. Other things on the to-do list of the development team include Bright's ability to know the user's interests and do tasks automatically.
"A desktop that really understands what you're doing, and not just for you, but also in a collaborative setting for people," Grit Denker, senior computer scientist at SRI International, described Bright.
The intelligent assistant will need to learn how a user utilizes the computer. Bright needs to learn from gestures, hand motions, and screen inputs the user makes. All of these data will enable Bright to anticipate what the user may need of the assistant software.
According to Krzsztof Gajos, computer science professor at Harvard who worked for the Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project of the Department of Defense, one of the challenges for Bright will be on distinguishing between mandatory and voluntary tasks.
"If you look back to systems like the Microsoft Clippy, you can see an example of a system that failed at that. The few times it failed were just so aggravating that it overshadowed any benefits the system might have provided for many users," Gajos pointed out.
Gajos said that Bright should still be able to make the human feel in control and be somehow useful even when it occasionally fails at tasks.
SRI International is responsible for developing the LCD, computer mouse, and the ARPAnet, which paved the way for the Internet.
See how Bright works by clicking the video below:
