Saturday, January 9, 2010

Jarvis - The Virtual Assistant

I have been busy writing alot of Java APIs lately, specifically for plugging into an virtual assistant that I am constructing, called Jarvis. The concept behind Jarvis is that of any assistant, it is a tool who or that helps another person accomplish his goals but the beauty of a virtual assistant is one that never sleeps and they don't take a salary. Communication is always a key to successful assistants and I have accomplished this by developing a modularised communication system which utilises email, SMS and chat rooms. For example, Jarvis is currently able to communicate via email, SMS and Google Talk. Commands can be issued via any of those methods and Jarvis responds via the appropriate medium based upon my status and using some seamless intelligence. For example, if I issue a command such as "define assistant" via SMS and the definition is over 160 characters the communication control centre will find a more appropriate medium to deliver the response, for example if I am logged into Google Talk then Jarvis responds via that channel.

I have been making good progress on this project over the past months, currently offloading tasks such as bank account checks (the jHSBC API mentioned below has been plugged into the Jarvis system and I receive alerts about bank account changes), and Jarvis is also plugged into my Google Calendar allowing the system to send updates via SMS to myself but also any other relevant parties who are attached to that event.

Designing Jarvis has prompted me to develop many APIs in order for the system to perform a wide range of tasks. The capabilities of Jarvis so far continue to extend, most recently I have developed a Java API for Weather and an API for mapping journeys. I will be releasing more information on these APIs shortly.

2 comments:

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