When I'm not on the air, I work on a cool Tech Start-up called Cognitive Code. CogCode is a company which specializes in a technology called SILVIA. SILVIA stands for Symbolically Isolated Linquistically Variable Intelligence Algorithms. And what is SILVIA? The short answer is that SILVIA is Conversational Artificial Intelligence. The long one is that this is technology enabling you to talk to your computer using natural language (or the language you normally speak) any way you want. And your computer will talk back to you, in different ways, in a more conversational way than other types of speech interactive technology like SIRI.
Yes, I just said SILVIA is similar to SIRI. But there are differences. First of all, SILVIA can run natively on your phone. Why is this pretty cool? Just think - all your interactions with SIRI and Google Voice are sent back to Apple or Google in the CLOUD and you have no idea what they do with your data. Aren't you tired of having no privacy? With SILVIA, it's all kept private on your device. It's encrypted so heavily, even we can't get into it. We don't feel it's good policy to be so nosy about what people are doing. She is also what they call, "context sensitive." This means she actually understands the gist of what you are saying and can, therefore, respond with a more meaningful answer.
So as you can tell, I'm pretty excited about this technology. It was developed by a geeky guy named Leslie Spring. One day in 2006, Leslie came up to me and proclaimed he had had a Eureka moment in his exploration of AI. (A little background, Leslie has been trying to develop HAL 9000 ever since his mom took him to see the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey, so he's been thinking about HAL ever since he was 4). At that point in time, SILVIA was raw, but I had a small inkling about how the computer works insofar as chatbot technology and I knew that SILVIA, even in the infant stages, was no chatbot. My miniscule amount of knowledge about chatty tech came from spending a summer cracking into the mainframes at Bowdoin College when I was a kid and encountering the early one known as ELIZA. Back in those days as a 12 year old, I made friends with the son of one of Bowdoin's Math professors. He snuck me into the computer room full of mainframes and he taught me some aspects of simple computer languages such as BASIC and FORTRAN and also showed me ELIZA. I was pretty excited to 'talk' to ELIZA, but quickly learned that it was just pure GIGO (garbage in and garbage out). In other words, the programming was such that if you typed in a sentence, then it would respond to that sentence specifically with a pre-programmed response. But it didn't really understand what you wanted. After asking ELIZA a few questions, I quickly became frustrated and shut it off to tinker with other things.
Back to SILVIA. Excitedly, I called my brother who I knew was already in the early stages of starting his own audio company. Our family has a long history in the audio industry, due to my dad having constructed the first language laboratory in the United States at Seton Hall University back in the '60's. On blind faith, without even seeing SILVIA, my brother agreed to help us and on that day, July 2006, the company was formed. At least verbally.
"They" will tell you, meanwhile, this is supposedly the first BIG mistake entrepreneurs make when starting up a company. Don't recruit friends and family. On the other hand, who else can you find who will work for nothing? Especially a new technology??
Take a look at an early demonstration of SILVIA here:
