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Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech?

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31–40 of 65 posts

Re: Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech?

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"send me to the chip shop" Do you have an accent by any chance - pretty much all voice recognition technology (Android, Apple, cars...) appears to be utterly flummoxed by my fairly mild Scottish accent. [Edit: to be fair, my accent is probably fairly mild by Scottish standards, not compared to RP].

Must be it, a golden oldy about Scottish speech recognition (2010): https://youtu.be/NMS2VnDveP8

I have to stop myself posting that every time the subject comes up (I know what it is without opening the link) :-)

Re: Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech?

#32

I'm pretty much doing that very thing. I'm quadriplegic, so every single action I want to take in the world has to be mediated through a third party. That said party is anything from another person to one of the digital assistants. As another poster mentioned I think, I control pretty much everything in my house including but not limited to unlocking doors, windows, climate control, the lights, posting to Twitter and…

Sounds very cool! What are you using for sensors and physical hardware? I mean light switches, temperature control etc - I browsed the home assistant site but didn't really come out with an understanding of what hardware the system can communicate with to, say, turn off a lightbulb.

You use a component to connect to some networked light control system. The "Light" category has 71 components: https://www.home-assistant.io/components/#light

An example would be IKEA Trådfri (https://www.home-assistant.io/components/tradfri/); you connect the lights to its gateway device, then Home Assistant will use the API provided by that gateway to control the lights.

Re: Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech?

#33
post #2

Siri is still half deaf and tries to send me to the chip shop when I ask it to send a message and they have a ridiculous amount of budget behind that so probably not. At the moment our technology is like Zorg’s desk in Fifth Element. Stuffed full of toys but ultimately will let you down too often to be relied upon.

This. What are the people in this thread talking about? Siri and Alexa mess up way too much.

Re: Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech?

#36

I think we are closer than we think. The problem is that all voice control up until now is a closed app with simplified intents. In my opinion what we need is a programming language whose REPL UX is voice-oriented, that eases the separation between using and extending the system. Prolog or a lisp could be quite near but we would require some changes such as: syntax easily read (:- in prolog is not very good), the abi…

I once toyed with the idea of a machine-oriented spoken conlang similar to Lisp in "syntax" by reserving certain syllables for punctuation (brackets, etc.) One of the main problems of existing solutions is that they lack flexibility due to the poor state of natural language understanding, which is solved by pretty much removing natural language from the equation. However, it would be unusable for most people, or at least would have a learning curve too steep for it to be practical.

Re: Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech?

#37
I don't think we are anywhere close to Jarvis which is general AI ( aka real AI aka "conscious" AI ) no more than we are anywhere close to building Ironman's nanotech suit. But we are improving on "dumb/unconscious" AI like Alexa, Siri, etc that could help with day to day life whilest spying on you 24/7.

Re: Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech?

#38
Well, for the speech detection part, I think, there are some projects that look promising.

I recently found https://github.com/gooofy/zamia-speech, which works for english and german. German is pretty bad atm, but english should work fine.

Nice part: You only have to spin up a docker container and a python script and can perform offline speech to text :-) Microphone input is also supported.

Re: Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech?

#39

I think we are closer than we think. The problem is that all voice control up until now is a closed app with simplified intents. In my opinion what we need is a programming language whose REPL UX is voice-oriented, that eases the separation between using and extending the system. Prolog or a lisp could be quite near but we would require some changes such as: syntax easily read (:- in prolog is not very good), the abi…

We need some type of Structured Query Language, call it SEQUEL, or maybe abbreviated SQL for short. /s

Jokes aside, maybe a LISP-like Sentence Processing Language might be the future of this type of HCI.

Re: Ask HN: Can we build Ironman's Jarvis with 2019 tech?

#40
I'm guessing this is where the Dragon Helmet [1] is headed - it has software (open source) that hopes to fulfil the responses and command execution. And of course mycroft [2] et al.

I think the real problem is getting the computer to do things that you haven't programmed it to do. If you imagine an Alexa / Google home where you have a conversation like:

"Hey Homexa, do a web search for an image of a piece of cheese, enlarge it to 2000x1500 pixels and email it to me please"

If it then came back with "Ok, please tell me how to enlarge an image" and you could give it step by step instructions, that would be amazing. But I don't think the comprehension required is quite there yet. But when we do, and especially if we can crowdsource the learned commands, things could get very, very interesting.

[1] http://dragon.computer/

[2] https://mycroft.ai/

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