Say it in English – and reQall remembers it for you
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Futures, Internet on
Do you speak fluent geek? Or would you rather your computer learned to speak your language? To those of us who’ve done a little programming, a regular expression is pretty clear. But when I’m reminding myself to call an airline or make a payment on my credit card, I think in comfortable phrases with fuzzy edges; Monday morning, any time before the banks close on Thursday. When it comes to doing the accounts, I’m more likely to think ‘last January’ than January 2007. When Windows XP said ‘My Documents’ it sounded like a toddler in a tantrum; when Outlook says Last Week, Last Month or A Long Time Ago, it sounds halfway human. A halfway human teenager, to whom everything more than four weeks old is ancient, but that’s more comfortable than inhuman precision.
Fuzzy human thinking is hard for computers, because sometimes the rules are hard to learn (when do banks close? When does my particular bank close? Is next Thursday tomorrow or in a week’s time if it’s 11.55 on Wednesday?). For other things they’re impossible to learn because we don’t know what they are. How do you tell the difference between a photo of a cat and a cartoon of a dog? You just know which is which, and you know instantly - but you can’t describe how you know well enough to teach the rules to a computer.
Jeff Hawkins, who once founded Palm, has been working on the neuroscience of what humans can do to turn it into something you could teach a computer. The neocortex of the brain, where this recognition happens, unfolds to about the size of a dinner napkin; ‘my dinner napkin is talking, your napkin is listening,’ as he puts it. And in the neo-cortex, recognition patterns are distributed hierarchically and in sequences. We learn spatial patterns and the sequences things happen in, which Hawkins calls hierarchal temporal memory. The brain is predicting what’s likely to happen next and confirming what you’re seeing, hearing and feeling by passing signals up and down the hierarchy. Hawkins’s company Numenta has software for working with hierarchal temporal memory; car manufacturers are using it to try and understand traffic, governments are more interested in identifying who is speaking on a particular phone call.
Even though Hawkins thinks HTMs in silicon can be millions of times faster than the rather slow neurons in your head, it’s going to be a while before computers really understand what we say. In the mean time, there are a few systems that can fake it quite well. Tripit is a travel service that knows the format of the confirmation messages you get from airlines, hotels and car hire companies; forward all the confirmations for your next trip and it will extract the information and combine it into an itinerary, along with weather reports and suggestions for local restaurants and activities. Instead of having to print out a sheaf of papers to carry with you, you can get the details you need in a single email on your phone.
Tripit doesn’t understand everything; the company needs to work out the format for every hotel chain individually and they haven’t started on conference registrations yet. ReQall aims to understand free speech, as long as you use the right keywords – like ‘remind me’ or ‘ask Simon’. You can email, text, IM or phone ReQall and use standard English – “remind me to call Virgin Atlantic at noon on Monday”- and come Monday you get a reminder by email, IM, phone or SMS as you prefer. It’s natural, it works the way people work and it understands at least half of the things you want it to understand.
It’s like asking a friend to remind you of something, but always having them remember to do it. In fact, sign a friend up, and as long as they agree,you can have them sent reminders too. Think of it as outsourced nagging…
-Mary
Rated: 60% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Wide Scale Pattern Analysis - May 5, 2008 on 7:56 pm
Hawkins needs to be very careful. If he keeps on banking on government interest, he will see his groups creations used for some horrific purposes.
I am no longer sure if his group is actually interested in the science or a just the business side. Anyone considering Numena “Open Sourceish” best remember that kernel of proprietary
Comment by Wide Scale Pattern Analysis - May 5, 2008 on 10:39 pm
Speaking of my previous rant, does no one see reQall as being ’someone just asked for superior wiretapping capabilities’ at DARPA? Please do not forget that DARPA has an interest in hawkins technology, and that triggered speech recognition followed by automated recording would be an essential tool in wide scale surveillance without the storage bottleneck.
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