Intelligent, Chatty Machines

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This high-level explainer could describe a number of conversational artificial-intelligence systems, but Spring claims that the major advance is that SILVIA's core algorithms can be implemented into a variety of applications and devices. At the Techcrunch40 conference demo, for instance, Spring showed a couple of the tricks that SILVIA can do when installed on a computer. For example, using SILVIA, Spring was able to open and close Word documents simply by making the request verbally in a conversational manner. (There are some programs that let people perform operations on computers with spoken words, but they require specific verbal commands.)

Spring says that SILVIA could work with Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems. Also, Cognitive Code has shown that the algorithms can be compressed enough to run on a smart phone. Initially, however, Spring says that Cognitive Code is targeting the toy market, and he hopes to see products, akin to Teddy Ruxpin, with "SILVIA Inside" within a couple of years.

It's still unclear, however, exactly how easy it will be to plug SILVIA into any system. Vasant Honavar, a professor of computer science at Iowa State University, says he expects that it would take a fair amount of work by engineers to put SILVIA into each platform. Honavar adds that in some of the applications that Cognitive Code is targeting, the responses will need to be much more accurate than the technology behind chatbots. "If you want it to delete a file and it deletes the wrong one, that wouldn't be good," he says.

And while Honavar is pleased to see Cognitive Code exploring business models for natural-language processing technology, he is hesitant to get too excited. "What I worry about [with] all this AI in general is that sometimes it's oversold, and it's hard to deliver on what's promised."

This is part of the reason that Cognitive Code is initially targeting the toy market, says Spring. There's a lot of flexibility in a teddy bear's conversation with a child, and the outcome isn't necessarily as critical as it could be on a computer used for business.