7/31/2009 PERMALINK
Civilian spin-offs of military's personal assistant bot project coming by year end US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent an estimated $150 million developing a personal assistant bot and although intended to ease the US military's bureaucratic load, expect an artificially intelligent helper based on DARPA's project to be coming your way later this year. Begun in 2003 the CALO, for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, project involved over 60 universities and research organizations and is the largest ever non-classified AI project. It ends this Friday and has produced a virtual assistant that can sort, prioritize, and summarize email; automatically schedule meetings; and prepare briefing notes before them.