07.03.07
SILVIA User Interface?
OK… so what happens when you want to actually talk to your computer… I’m not talking about speech-to-text… this is a conversational communication with a computer – just talking to a computer.
Alan Turing described it as “computer intelligence” – what people now call the “turing test” – when a computer can understand the conversational style of a user and interpret it as commands. Think of it as HAL 9000.
So want to know where the future of computer interfaces is? Talk to SILVIA, Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms. ( http://cognitivecode.com/ ). I’m sitting here with a futurist who is discussing how these SILVIA computers not only talk to us, but can talk to each other – if I’m looking for something, I just speak it into my bluetooth headset – my SILVIA-enabled cell phone might not know the answer, but it talks to other SILVIA devices and can find the answer without me having to know how to find the answer. I’m not talking about simple Google searches – maybe I’m looking for how many people are on line right now at Red Robin – their reservation system has SILVIA and so now I know how many people are waiting… and I can add my name to the queue.
Or what about this: SILVIA understands English and Japanese and many other languages. We teleconference between the US and Japan and SILVIA immediately translates our words… not just “word for word”, but actually with the nuances and inferences only a native speaker would be able to translate.
So what does this mean to us? Even more so we don’t need to teach students memorizable facts… we need to teach them how to find information
Thanks,
Chris
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