Almond: Crowdsourcing an Open, Programmable Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants are fast becoming a proprietary platform duopoly that controls access to the web and has access to private information in all accounts and IoTs. This talk will present Almond, an op …
| Talk Title | Almond: Crowdsourcing an Open, Programmable Virtual Assistant |
| Speakers | Giovanni Campagna (Student, Stanford University) |
| Conference | Open Source Summit + ELC North America |
| Conf Tag | |
| Location | San Diego, CA, USA |
| Date | Aug 19-23, 2019 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
Virtual assistants are fast becoming a proprietary platform duopoly that controls access to the web and has access to private information in all accounts and IoTs. This talk will present Almond, an open, crowdsourced, privacy-preserving virtual assistant. Almond uses the crowdsourced Thingpedia skill library, currently containing over 100 services, that is open to all virtual assistants. Almond is unique in supporting event-driven commands that connect multiple skills. Almond is also federated, helping users share data at fine granularity without a third-party.Almond is built using Genie, an open-source tool that enables developers to bootstrap deep-learning natural language parsers in new domains quickly. Genie improves by over 20% on the previous state of the art. Genie is available as a web service and as a library. Almond can be run as a cloud service, a GNOME/Gtk app (on Flathub), and also a command line tool. Almond has attracted collaborations from 4 other groups to date.
