FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
Story image
Three AI projects that come close to making HAL 9000 a reality
Fri, 23rd Jun 2017
FYI, this story is more than a year old

HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the most iconic fictional AI being.

Within the film HAL faithfully serves his crew, however this AI eventually turns on his human overlords and starts killing them off.

I think for this reason most of us are happy that HAL remains a piece of fiction.

Accept he's not, forms of AI like HAL are real and they have made their way into to offices and homes across the globe.

Fortunately for us they remain our ever docile servants for now.

Here are three AI that come awfully close to HAL 9000.

Braina

Briana is an intelligent personal assistant that is currently available for download on Windows and Android .

It is a functional artificial intelligence software that provides a single window environment to control your computer and perform wide range of tasks using voice commands.

Braina is under constant development and she is being designed to understand, think and even learn from experience  just like a human would.

Key features overview
  • Briana can convert speech to text.
  • Play songs and videos.
  • Control your PC Wirelessly via Android.
  • Read e-books and emails to you .
  • Solve complex mathematical problems.

Briana can also tell jokes and users can even change its name to HAL if they are feeling particularly daring.

Viv

Viv is a project created by the minds behind Siri.

It is an artificial intelligence platform that enables developers to distribute their products through an intelligent, conversational interface.

Viv is designed to be a utility tool and can be integrated into almost any electronic product.   

The more products Viv is integrated into, the more the AI learns, this makes it one of the most sophisticated forms of AI that exist right now.

Key features overview
  • Can easily be integrated into almost any app.
  • Learns as its integration network is expanded.
  • Can answer user queries.
  • Includes all the essential AI assistant functions.

Viv joined Samsung and is currently being developed for all Samsung devices.

Cortana

Cortana is an AI created by Windows and comes pre-installed on all of their latest devices.

This AI is based on the well beloved companion of Master Chief  from the Halo franchise.

Like Viv, Cortana constantly learns from all incoming data.

She also drastically changes her accents and punctuation based on the region she is operating in.

Key features overview
  • Cortana is excellent at scheduling
  • Keeping users up to date with upcoming events.
  • She is connected to 51 different apps making her extremely versatile when answering questions.
  • Cortana can be very chatty

These are just three of the most intelligent commercially available AI, with plenty more on their way.

AI are becoming an essential part of our daily lives, even beginning to automate all aspects of a household.

With some of these products already surpassing the capability of HAL 9000, I'm just glad they are still on our side.