HVAC Control in the New Millennium.pdf - HVAC.Amickracing

PC-based Control, Software and Bus TrendsChatterbots such as used by Neuromedia, in its Neuro Server Engine,provide a demonstration of a virtual customer service representative.This chatterbot exists as a box into which you type text. Customerscan talk to it and get answers to their questions most of the time, cuttingdown on the time they spend on the phone talking to a human representative.The chatterbot does not reason, it only matches patterns. Anotherchatterbot is used by the Big Science Company. The chatterbot calledAndrette replies to your questions and shows different pictures of thecharacter.When natural language or a chatterbot is to control an application,the result is sometimes called a social interface. NetSage uses several ofthese, including its social Intelligence Server. NetSage uses an AnimatedIntelligent Agent and NetSage’s languages allow companies to developsystems that act as sales or support representatives.The Social Intelligence Server has been used to develop the OfficeAssistant in Office 97 and the voice user interface in General Magic’sPortico virtual assistant. This telephone assistant allows you to remotelysend copies and play phone messages. Another voice actuated businessservice is Webley’s Systems Webley Service.Voice Recognition SoftwareAnother example of a more human interface involves voice recognition,which has been evolving at an exceptional rate. Products likeDragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM’s ViaVoice are popular in continuous-speechrecognition applications. Many limitations of these productswill soon be overcome. One area of achievement is towards eliminatingthe time users must spend training the software to recognize theirvoices. These programs are becoming speaker independent and IBM’sspeech development department has demonstrated software that youcall over the phone. It answers and directs your questions based on yourresponse, without any training required.Telephone-based systems have also been targeted by the MITLaboratory for Computer Science. Their speech understanding systemsare designed for specialized functions such as weather reports. Internetaccess lags telephone use, so voice is a way of bringing out applicationsto more people. The Jupiter system uses speech understanding to an-©2001 by The Fairmont Press, Inc. All rights reserved.