North Side

Our natural language pipeline enables a player to communicate with a game character in English, and say what he wants, in his own words, instead of clicking on a canned dialogue line written by someone else. Real, live dialogue with the a character is more immersive than choosing canned dialog from a dialogue tree - the current approach to supporting dialogue in games. With dialog trees, one traverses a game based on a pre-determined order, established by the story writer. Intelligent, free-form dialog based on world-knowledge contributes to a more immersive experience, where every gameplay session is truly unique and creative. After Bot Colony stabilizes, we plan to offer access to our dialogue pipeline to game developers whose games could benefit from unrestricted natural language interaction.

In our Bot Colony game, we use English commands to animate our characters. Language-based animation works in the same way, irrespective of whether a character is commanded interactively, or through a programming API (we use natural language programming). We plan to embed our technology into software tools that will enable end-users to create language-based 3D animation for entertainment and training, as well as video games.

Current state of the art in computer-based instruction of a second language consists of associating multiple-choice answers with pictures, or reading text aloud.

With our Bot Colony™ Play to Learn™ technology, you speak English in order to accomplish a useful task – exactly what you need to do when traveling to an English speaking country. You will get individual feedback about the errors you tend to make. You’ll practice your English in everyday scenarios: you’ll ask for directions, you’ll buying something, you’ll ask how how something works – the same experience you’d have if you were teleported to an English speaking country and everybody you spoke to was an English teacher.

An Intelligent Assistant helps you book meetings, gives you directions to a place, finds movies or restaurants for you, and so on. Intelligent Assistants are deployed on mobile devices or desktops. Our software makes the dialogue with an Intelligent Assistant very natural.

Mobile computing applications are often operated hands-off, as the user needs to access information without using a desktop computer. Current devices support keyword-based access to information, but they cannot be commanded completely in natural language. Here are some things that are difficult to do with current technology:

• query a meeting by subject
• be warned when you may have time conflicts with a previous engagement that overruns
• resend an e-mail to someone you forgot to include in the initial distribution someone you forgot,
• search for something and have a relevant summary read to you

People are buying more and more things online. Instead of using GUI’s, where you traverse an interface in the order defined by the designer, why not say what you want, as if you were speaking with another person? Imagine if your shopping experience were as natural as this:

• Imagine booking air travel, accomodation and local transportation through a conversational interface, like talking to a travel agent (TRAVEL)
• Imagine conversing with a virtual insurance broker to tailor the coverage to your needs and budget. (INSURANCE)
• Imagine paying bills and transferring funds by speaking with a virtual teller. (BANKING)
• Imagine shopping for home improvement products by speaking with a virtual 'sales associate' who provides you guidance. (SHOPPING)

One of the key attributes of our technology is being able to understand what you mean irrespective of the words you use. In search, this translates to searching for an item of information using your own words. Intelligent Help requires the same technology. Today’s help systems require that you know the precise vendor terminology under which information is indexed. You naturally think about your problem in your own words, but the software vendor uses other terms for it, and indexes the information using those terms. Therefore, it is difficult to get to the information you want if you describe what you want in your words. Applications programmed in controlled-English using our intuitive Goal, Context, Plan paradigm will also benefit from contextual help - just the information you need at a precise point in a task.