2023–24 Projects:
I can take out my iPhone, hold down the Home button, and speak to Siri, making requests like "Set a timer for ten minutes" or "Call Mary" or "Who is the prime minister of Australia?" or "Tell me a joke" or even "Sing me a song" (which was pretty amusing). All of those produced satisfactory results this morning, in contrast to "Get this wasp out of my office," which didn't go as well.
Despite their often humorous limitations, intelligent personal assistants like Siri, Google Now, Sher.pa, etc. are pretty useful. There are many good reasons to think we'll never see HAL 9000 or Samantha, but the potential applications for natural-language-driven agents is huge even if they fall short of sentience and homicidal insanity.
For this project, you will develop a system for converting requests expressed in English into formal queries for various web-based and local-device services. For example, "Find me a pizza restaurant in Northfield" could be translated into a query using the Yelp API, "What time is it?" might be converted into a Unix "date" command, "What is the Spanish word for goat?" could become a query for the Ultralingua API, and more specialized questions might be translated into SQL queries for a database you develop for the purpose.
Though creating a full-blown intelligent personal assistant with all the UI bells and whistles sounds fun, we'll keep our core focus narrower for this project: develop a system for translating English requests into suitable formal language requests. Specifically, you will: