DARPA Builds Smarter Version of Microsoft's Clippy

holy_calamity writes "Microsoft's animated paperclip may be long dead, but a $150m DARPA project has resurrected the idea of a virtual assistant. AI researchers from more than 60 institutions worked on the project entitled CALO. CALO is designed to help ease the bureaucratic burden of the military. A consumer spinoff, Siri, is coming to the iPhone later this year. It responds to conversational voice commands to take over multi-step tasks like choosing and booking restaurants or cabs."

Comments

Re:So has anyone asked the question...

[Bluesman]

This is a quintessential military approach to a problem:

"We're spending way too much time and money on [stupid thing]."

"Well, we have a new process that will allow us to do [stupid thing] much faster!"

"Great!"

Examples abound. A perfect one is the primary mode of communication on ships is radio, even though the networks (i.e. chat) are far faster and more reliable. We'll spend hours troubleshooting radios over chat in order to pass voice messages over radio. Then we'll chat again to confirm that the recipient actually received the radio message properly.