Speech recognition & AI, formatting your to-do lists?

 

 Meet CALO - An artificial intelligence project Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and coordinated by SRI International. What's interesting to us is it's research into using speech recognition to understand, organize and assemble task information.. from everyday meetings.

 CALO promises, among other things, to use speech recognition to make a transcription of what's said during meetings, and using it's understanding of a user's projects/contacts, to compile to-do lists and appointments!

Imagine.. When you logon every morning, your computer reminds you it's assembled a list of tasks and meeting requests from yesterday's meeting - while you were asleep. How cool is this?

The military's research into AI coupled with speech recognition goes back at least a quarter of a century, in 1982 a study was published regarding different AI alogorithms applied to speech recognizers.

The study of artificial intellience is thought by many to have originated in 1947 with the mathmetician Alan Turing, although it seems he initially believed 'Machine Intelligence’ to be an apparent contradiction in terms.

What CALO promises is a far cry from Turing's "Can a machine be intelligent?" musings; and we believe it's yet another step towards fulfilling Bill Gate's recent prediction, that speech recognition will quickly become the next user paradigm!