Open Virtual Assistant Lab

Mission of the OVAL Lab

Voice is the next frontier in computer interfaces.

Knowledge in Voice

All knowledge in the world will be available by voice, and in all languages. This represents the next big leap in the evolution of search engines.

Dialogues as Intuitive Software Interfaces

All consumer-facing software will have a dialogue interface. To achieve this goal, we need to reduce the cost of dialogue agent development by 2 orders of magnitude. The answer is tools, tools that empower millions of natural language interface developers.

End-User Task Automation

Professionals and consumers will be able to automate their digital tasks by using a multimodal interface combining voice with graphical user interfaces.

Human-Centered AI

As we aim to fulfill the above vision, we ensure that our technology is accessible to all and that user privacy is protected.

The Open Virtual Assistant Initiative

We have launched an initiative in July to create an open-source virtual assistant infrastructure to support experimentation in research and to provide a basis of collaboration in the industry. This is made possible by a grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with the goals of protecting open access to knowledge and to protect privacy.

An oligopoly is emerging in virtual assistants today. With, for example, Alexa boasting of 60,000 compatible IoT devices and 100,000 third-party skills, we are witnessing the creation of proprietary voice-based webs with the assistants being the gatekeepers. Given how virtual assistants are typically given access to many personal accounts, they will gain access to massive amounts of personal data. Having a handful of companies own detailed private information worldwide, intermediate access to most digital information and services, and have outsized power to shape individual behavior are profoundly troubling.

We will be making beta releases throughout this year, with the goals of delivering in one year:

1. Genie, an open-source, well-documented, toolkit to support Virtual Assistant 2.0 Technology. This toolkit supports natural language programming by synthesizing training data from high-level specification and avoids the need of massive manual annotation of training data.
2. Thingpedia, a non-proprietary skill repository open to all assistants. It collects natural-language interfaces to the web and the Internet of Things. Thingpedia is open and crowdsourced like Wikipedia, which can potentially grow to be larger than any proprietary database.
3. An open-source, privacy-preserving assistant with the top 10 most popular domains. The goal is to eventually create an alternative to Alexa and Google Assistant, similar to how Unix/Linus is an alternative to Windows, and Firefox is an alternative to Chrome. Here is a stable version of our research prototype, Almond.

Please see our roadmap. This endeavor needs the support and contributions from funding agencies, companies, researchers, developers, and individuals. Please contact us.

We are also looking for a couple of talented engineers to join the team. Job announcement

Our current partners include:

• Alpha Vantage Open Stock API provides programmatic access to global financial market and currency data.
• Home Assistant provides a local gateway to over 1000 different IoT devices. Almond is bundled as a voice assistant interface.
• Smartnews, a news aggregator, is collaborating in creating a news skill.
• Yelp is providing access to APIs to answer questions about restaurants.