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The world of Virtual Assistants – more SemTech …
Just finished viewing Tom Gruber’s SemTech 2009 presentation Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant. See the video below:
[Vimeo 5424527]
An absolutely wonderful presentation! Tom Gruber is a really great speaker, and he had a powerful story to tell.
So what are the core capabilities of a Virtual Personal Assistant? Well, according to Gruber they are it:
- Does things for you – focus on Task completion
- Gets what you say – intent understanding via Conversation
- Gets to know you – learns and applies Personal Information
A few slides highlight some key points:
Task Flow Models provide Activity context
The virtual assistant models core task workflows to guide the decision logic when providing services to the user.
Application Architecture – the mother of all Mashups
The Virtual Assistant mashes up Services on the backend, and applies then to domain and task models in the core application tier.
Understanding the Context is key
Multiple contexts are considered when servicing a user’s request. If the context is ambiguous, the application will attempt to disambiguate the context by asking the user questions to resolve the ambiguity.
Here’s a link to the presentation slides from Tom’s talk.
Great stuff.
glenn
Semantic Web – Aaah, so NOW I get it …
So I was viewing Tom Gruber’s presentation at the SemTech 2009 conference in San Jose in June, and I was blown away by a video Tom played at the beginning of the presentation. The video is a 20-year-old video that Apple created that, to an extraordinary degree, forecast aspects of ubiquitous, global, real-time, social, semantic Web that has and is emerging.
The video is demos a ficticious Apple product called Knowledge navigator, and it sets the stage for Tom’s presentations. Here’s the video:
Blow my mind! This was created over 20 years ago (1987)! Now watch Gruber’s presentation.
glenn
Semtech 2009 videos on the Web
Man do I love the Web – the (typically) free access to valuable content and learning resources is just so cool!
So I stumbled across a list of videos from the Semantic Technology conference held in June 2009 in San Jose. This is the industry’s premier conference BTW, so all the big-wigs in the SemTech universe were there. Here the link to the conference videos on Vimeo.
I think I’ll blog on a few of the presentations separately, but for now, here’s a list of some or the more compelling videos:
Applications and Technology
- Linked Open Data panel
- The Semantic Web Gang looks back at SemTech 2009
- Tom Tague on the opportunities in the Semantic Web
- Panel: Semantic Advertising Roundtable
- KEYNOTE: The Game Changer: Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant
- Semantic Search – New Services: Bing and Siri
- Semantic Search Beyond RDF
Publishing and the Semantic Web
Powerful stuff. The Semantic Web, and Linked Data, are getting ready to hit the mainstream. It’s impact will, in time, be significant IMO.
glenn
End of Business as Usual - Glenn's blog 