[GTALUG] Mycroft an Open Source AI [was privacy [was Alternative to KOrganizer (KDE) ?]]

[Christopher Browne]

On 13 August 2015 at 08:46, Myles Braithwaite <me at mylesbraithwaite.com>
wrote:
>
> D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> > Many, but not all, of these leaks come with advantages to the user.
> > For example, Cortana, Siri, and Google Now(?) may be fun but they are
> > always listening to you and sending something home.  Google (and
> > other) search have to send the queries upstream.
>
> Has anyone checked out/backed Mycroft on Kickstarter
> <
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-an-open-source-artificial-intelligence-for
>
> as an open replacement for speech driven AI (i.a. Siri, Cortana, Google
> Now) that easily hackable?

It's sorta cute, though I'd think it somewhat uninteresting as an
"artificial
intelligence," basically on the basis that I don't think voice recognition
is a terribly wonderful direction to go.  Open-ended, but perhaps too
much so to do things I'd *care* about.

As near as I can tell, the voice recognition in these products has been
pretty nearly useless.  There are cruel drive-by pranks to the effect of
"Siri, find all the [offensive material on phone].  Forward as email to
Mom."  I'd expect the process to fail because it failed to recognize
one word.

The awesome wee joke of yesteryear...

Q:  How many Newtons does it take to change a lightbulb?
A:  Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

Voice recognition has improved, but it still tends to be laughably
bad.

The part of Google New that seems pretty useful is the aspect of it
having a whole bunch of forms of "useful-things-to-do-with-patterns"
recognition that point at various sorts of event streams to output
"you might care about this soon".

Thus...
- Noticing that you stopped driving (due to change in velocity), and
  noting that location as a probable recent parking spot.
  Thank you for automatically remembering my parking spot.
- Rummaging through mailbox and noticing emails containing
  shipment identifiers, and pointing that out.
  Thank you for tracking where my "goods to be delivered" are.
- Rummaging through calendar and noting that they're coming
  up.
- Further to that, checking addresses against current
  location, and warning when I need to leave to get there.
- Further to that, checking for traffic difficulties and warning
  of traffic jams, slowdowns, ad infinitum.
- Rummaging through mailbox, noticing emails from
  airlines about upcoming flights, and reporting about
  FLIFO (flight info)
- For sports fans, reporting results of recent games relating
  to favorite teams.
- Weather updates, including local warnings of major adverse
  weather events (storms, tornados, and such)

This notion of integrating together the "bread crumbs" of things
that are worth being reminded about seems to me to be the
Next Wave of useful Artificial Intelligence, and it's nothing
to do with voice recognition.

It's actually not forcibly about needing to share ALL your data
with a Google or such; to have your own daemon reading through
your email or calendar looking for things of interest is quite
plausible.  Such processes are sufficiently messy that
I can easily see central processors having some advantage
as they can be pointed at enough messy data sources to
get debugged more successfully than my half-baked wee
script.  I'll bet there are some poor script writers at Google
balking at new emails coming from airlines, but perhaps
better that than me deciding to not bother.

I'll toss out that a recent "rather creepy TMI thing" didn't have
an Evil Central Authority as its cause...

- My phone started warning me about an impending
  flight from Philadelphia to Seattle
- As this wasn't my plan, I started poking at why...
- Apparently a "Christine Browne" accidentally put my
  email address as her contact address for her frequent
  flyer program.  (No relation; caused by typo...)
- Fun ensues as I'm getting way Too Much Information
  from her airline about her family's vacation plans.

For further fun in the matter, I could have used the
access that I was given to muss around with the
whole family's seating on their flights.  And there
seemed to be some baggage-related exploits.  Which
is a security weakness on the part of the airline, but
induced by incorrect authentication information.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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