Watson the supercomputer’s recent victory over human opponents on Jeopardy! thrust artificial intelligence into the spotlight, but Watson certainly isn’t the only machine capable of human conversation. And one program developed by an Erie company puts artificial intelligence to work making people’s lives easier.
Robert Medeksza, founder and president of Erie company Zabaware, started developing the artificial intelligence program Ultra Hal in 1997, spurred by his interest in ELIZA, a pioneering program that facilitated conversation between human and machine.
Medeksza’s creation, Ultra Hal, is software that conducts conversations with its users and builds its
knowledge based on each conversation. Some converse with its virtual web-chat companion or on Facebook or Twitter. It’s also available as a text-to-speech reader or personal assistant that keeps track of your appointments and contacts.
Medeksza says 1.5 million people have downloaded Ultra Hal since 2002. Each person who downloads it inherits its central memory bank, but it develops a personal memory for each user.
Later this year, Medeksza plans to make Ultra Hal available as a platform for other users to adapt for their own purposes; he sees its artificial intelligence capabilities having potential for use in customer service, for one thing. He’s also developing a link between Ultra Hal and search engines, so it can search for answers to questions users pose in conversation. Medeksza also hopes to introduce a mobile version of Ultra Hal that would have the same memory on each user’s various computers and cell phones.
Source: Robert Medeksza, Zabaware
Writer: Rebecca VanderMeulen
