Want to participate in building a world of intelligent personal assistants? The opportunity awaits at SparkingTogether, where researchers, programmers, and companies can contribute features, behavior and knowledge to an online platform, dubbed FIONA, for creating next-gen virtual avatars. FIONA stands for Framework for Interactive Services Over Natural-conversational Agents.   

“People sparking together” is how Patricia Lopez, marketing manager at Adele Robots, the robotics startup behind the platform, describes the system. Contributors create code or design that gets wrapped in the FIONA API so that it can be converted into a Spark – which is an application that can become part of the avatar, whether that be its voice, language or a function (NLP, text-to-speech, computer vision, or 3D design, for instance). The company will host a Sparkstore where developers can sell, or freely share, their Sparks with the world, and those interested in using avatars can then combine different Sparks together in the Sparklink environment. Sparkrender is a capability it’s developed for users to post their avatars – which run on Adele Robots’ servers in the cloud – on their websites or mobile apps.

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The Cogito team has been working on applying semantic technologies to customer service operations. The team writes, “We’re proud to announce our work with Vodafone, one of the world’s largest mobile communications groups. Working with technology partner Assist, we’re using our Cogito Answers semantic platform to provide SMS based customer service that is now successfully handling more that 500,000 SMS requests each month. When a user sends an SMS to the system—“how much will I pay for calls to London?”—Cogito Answers interprets and categorizes the request and quickly retrieves the answer from the internal knowledge base.” Read more