Michigan Software Developers Create Customizable Personal Assistant

A group from the University of Michigan has developed a program that will allow almost human-like interaction between people and their computers. The system is called Sirius, which works similar to Siri, but takes the technology to a new level by allowing the program to be customized according to personal preference.

"Now the core technology is out of the bag, and we all have access to it," said Jason Mars, engineer and co-creator of Sirius. "Instead of making an app to run on the Apple Watch, for example, maybe I could make my own watch. We're very excited to see what the world comes together to build and learn with Sirius as a starting point."

Developers of this program claim Sirius is an “end-to-end voice and vision personal assistant,” which utilizes speech and image recognition, along with an advanced question and answer system that will allow users to, for example, photograph a building and ask: who built this? when was this built?

Sirius was presented over the weekend at the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems.