Thinking  and Other Intelligent programs

Introduction | Intelligent Software | Natural language input/output systems | Perceptive (Machine vision) systems | Expert systems | Intelligent agents and bots | Creative software | Virtual Humans

 

  Introduction For over 50  years,  the concept of robots  and thinking machines  has spawned continuous dialog on their potential to simulate human abilities. At various  times, researchers created  different criteria to evaluate the edge, where  functionality of the software applications or  robots could  be similar to something belonging  to human's  behavior. As the technology evolved  and became more sophisticated, so did the evaluation criteria.  A.M. Turing in 1950 suggested a test  for determining  whether  a computer were to be regarded as "intelligent". The Loebner prize contest is annual attempt to find the world's  most "human-seeming" application or machine. The  examples  written below must have convinced everyone, that the possibility for  realization of the main human functions such as abilities to think, create something, speak, see, hear, etc. have been mostly proved  separately for each function, and partly in common for humanoid robots. Obviously, mankind is close to the solution of the complex problem which is the creation of a device that can be confused functionally with humans. Of course, it will not have what we call a soul. It is not difficult to predict, that this problem will be solved  fully in this century.

There are many  applications not covered, and some vendors could fit in multiple categories, but due to space limitations, there are only included in one.

Intelligent Software (Artificial Intelligence applications)  covers the following field of knowledge (computer science): natural language input/output systems, perceptive systems, expert systems, creative programs, and so on. Here are the some Artificial Intelligence applications:

Natural language input/output systems  are developed  in the following ways:  speech recognition, understanding natural words, automated translation from one language to others, and  generation of speech. In the last decade, computer speech recognition reached a practical level for many purposes. Many companies have replaced former communication  systems  by the  systems using speech recognition. Today,  Nuance (ScanSoft) maintains the industry's most extensive portfolio of speech technologies, applications and services, comprising speech recognition, text-to-speech, dictation, auto-attendants, and so on.

Perceptive (Machine vision)  systems  are computer vision (optical, infrared and so on) systems including  powerful tools for image pre-processing, measurement, analysis, and data transfer operations.  These systems are primarily used for high-tech manufacturing applications such as: electronics, semiconductors, precision mechanical components and assemblies, aeronautics & aerospace, automotive, etc.  Samples of this technology  include:

Expert systems: Expert systems are a category of applications  of Artificial Intelligence which  focuses on the development of computer systems to simulate the processes of knowledge acquisition, problem solving, etc. See the page:  AI and Expert systems

Intelligent agents and bots:  Intelligent agent is the software program which accomplishes some task automatically and autonomously once triggered. The term "bot" originates from the classification of intelligent agents as "knowledge robots", which subsequently got shortened to just "knowbots" or even "bots". Bots or Intelligent agents allow us, for example,  to search for information;  answer specific questions;  inform customers about future events;  provide custom news;  check and sort  resumes, etc. 

Creative software:  This type of applications is capable of generating patterns or new knowledge as  ideas derived from its absorbed knowledge or heuristics. Examples include:

Virtual Humans are  just now on the verge of being truly useful in the roles of  presenters, teachers, translators, and so on. Virtual people are like humans, with a huge difference: they  can  do superhuman things, like never forgetting anything and being able to immediately access the databases to find answers to questions, etc. Here are the following examples:

 

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