The Open Virtual Assistant Initiative
We have launched an initiative in July 2020 to create an open-source virtual assistant infrastructure to support experimentation in research and to provide a basis of collaboration in the industry. This is made possible by a grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with the goals of protecting open access to knowledge and to protect privacy. We are seeking collaboration and contribution to these three specific objectives:
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Democratizing NLP with the Genie tool set. Our recent technical breakthrough enables robust dialogue agents be developed without requiring labor-intensive annotation of training data. Our tool set, called Genie, can create effective dialogue agents given the schema of a domain. All the Genie tools, training data sets, neural models, and libraries are publicly available so companies can easily create and own their voice interfaces.
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Creating an open assistant skill repository: Thingpedia.
Thingpedia is a crowdsourced repository of assistant skills, which are voice interfaces to IoT devices, web services, and question answering. Contributors specify the domain schemas and API calls, and neural-network based interfaces will be automatically generated using the Genie toolkit. All the skill specifications and neural parsers are non-proprietary and made publicly available to all assistants; like Wikipedia, Thingpedia has the potential to surpass proprietary systems.
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Privacy protection through inter-operating Genie assistants.
Open-source Genie-based virtual assistants support privacy by allowing individuals to keep their data private.
Assistants can inter-operate using a sophisticated and secure communication protocol, similar to email. Users can use natural language to share whatever, and with whomever, they want, and no centralized third party sees the shared data.
We will be making beta releases throughout, with the goals of delivering an open virtual assistant with the top 10 most popular domains by Q3 2021. Here is a stable version of our research prototype, Almond.
Please see our roadmap.
This endeavor needs the support and contributions from funding
agencies, companies, researchers, developers, and individuals.
Please contact us.
We are also looking for a couple of talented engineers to join the team. Job announcement
Our current partners include:
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Alpha Vantage Open Stock API provides programmatic access to global financial market and currency data.
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Home Assistant
provides a local gateway to over 1000 different IoT devices.
Almond is bundled as a voice assistant interface.
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Smartnews, a news aggregator, is collaborating in creating a news skill.
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Yelp is providing access to APIs to answer questions about
restaurants.