Transcript Essistants - James Schumacher`s Information Page

The Sprint Essistant:
Interactive Services Through a Natural UI
James Schumacher
[email protected]
January 2002
Sprint Advanced Technology Laboratories
Burlingame, California
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The Sprint Essistant
A federated system of loosely coupled
services made cohesive through an
innovative multi-modal interface.
Leveraging such components as animated
agents and Text to Speech engines, the
Essistant enables the user to make a
personalized connection to the services.
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What is the Essistant?
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Not the desktop
Ubiquitous computing
Smart House / Smart Space
Pervasive Computing
Speech & Transparent User Interfaces
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LAN as Client
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Federated Services
Backend Services feed the LAN
LAN as intermediary
LAN Services function autonomously
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The LAN & Connectivity
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“Broadband is five years away.”
Long live narrowband (DSL & Cable)
Down rates average ~400kb/s
Leveraging “Always On”
Fat Content Over Skinny Pipes
Keep Data Flowing.
Maximize the use of narrowband.
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Fat Content over Skinny Pipes
 Assumptions:
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Typical broadband connectivity is 0.3 -1.5 Mbps.
BW bottlenecked pipes not necessarily at the last mile.
Multimedia content (mostly video) is emerging.
High percentage of multimedia content is stored.
Most of multimedia content is currently
encoded/delivered at a constant bitrate.
• Broadcast quality content > 1.5Mbps
 Can this content be sent over a slow pipe?
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Fat Content over Skinny Pipes
 LAN utilization of fat content:
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Active Prefetched media
Video-on-demand
Purchase of multi-media (Music, DVDs, etc)
Rich media web sites pre-cached.
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Services of the Essistant
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Fat Content download manager
Various content agents (news, traffic, etc)
Room control (lights, thermostat, security)
Entertainment system (set-top box, VCR)
Chatter-bots (e.g ALICE)
Robots
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Essistant User Interface
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Speech Recognition
Animated Characters
Text-to-Speech response
Face recognition / Motion Detectors
Other sensors (e.g thermostat, microphone)
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Essistant Sample
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Enabling Technologies
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Connectivity & Bandwidth
Processing Power
Speech Recognition
Text-To-Speech
Real-Time Animation
Face Recognition
Robots
Artificial Intelligence
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Enabling Technology: Bandwidth
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“Broadband is five years away”
What to do with 100mb?
Not just faster web pages
Entertainment, Cable TV, VOD.
Telephony and VoIP
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Enabling Tech: Mobile Bandwidth
 Network is always with you
 Mobile, G3 connectivity
 Connectivity to home LAN from anywhere
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Generic Architecture
Agent
Preference
database
Intelligent
Agent
Network Provider
User-Agent
Net-Agent
Databases
AI
User-Network
Home
User
Prefs
User-Agent
User-Network
Mobile User
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Enabling Tech: Artificial Intelligence
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Speech Recognition
Natural Language Processing
Chatter-Bots (ALICE)
Profiling, and auto preferences
Semantic Web & Ontologies
Inference Engines (e.g Cycorp)
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Use of AI to predict user requirements
 Wide availability of AI engines.
 AI capabilities have increased, cost has decreased
significantly.
 Ideally suited to alter the form of interfaces to the
network based on user requirements and user
input.
 Advanced form of user profiling and
personalization.
 AI predictions may alter the network usage and its
patterns considerably.
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Current Trends: Personalized Interactive Services
 Goal:
• Development of a distributed network and client-aware
interactive system which integrates and delivers
personalized content and services to users in a seamless
manner through agent technology and network-based
user information.
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Personalizing content.
Personalizing interaction.
Seamlessly introducing new services.
Allowing accessibility by different devices/networks
(PCS, broadband, etc.).
• Providing for targeted advertisement.
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Enabling Technology: Animation & 3D
 Three dimensional displays
 Three dimensional cameras
 Dynamic real-time animation
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Live 3D capture technologies
 Z-Cam
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3D Display Technology
 Stereoscopic monitors
 Multi-planar monitors
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Robotics and Physical Presence
 Capabilities of robots have increased at a
much lower cost
 Virtual Presence
• Virtual Telecommuter
• Human/Robot remote collaboration (POP
troubleshooting…)
• Users can have a physical presence 
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Robotics and Physical Presence (cont’d)
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MPEG-4 Applicability
 Emerging international standard for delivery of
multimedia traffic.
 Provides:
• Delivery of all known media types over any transport
mechanism (IP, ATM, RTP, MPEG-2 Transport Stream,
etc.).
• Scene coherency and synchronization.
• Scalability due to bandwidth (BW) or client device
limitations.
• Interactivity with 3D objects and object-based
compression and delivery.
• Encode-once/use-everywhere content.
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High-Level Architecture
MPEG4/Anim
Server Side
Client Side
Agent Client
MPEG-4 Player
MPEG-4 Server
component w profiler
Animation Engine
(Server)
w profiler
Signalling path
Voice/Face
Recognition
Data path
Sprint
Controller
Profile Manager
AI engine
Interaction Engine
Content
Databases
Backend
AAA
Billing
Service
Control
Text-to-Speech
Server
Service 1 Service 2
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Current Status
 Prototype of a network to user interface.
 Platform for test of intent interpretation
technologies.
 Open user-end platform for quick addition
of novel services.
 Ongoing Integration with MPEG-4
infrastructure.
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A Glimpse of a Possible Future…
VoD
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Economic Models
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Flat-Rate Pricing currently in use
Usage-Based Pricing?
Service-Based Pricing?
On-Demand Self-Enrollment for Services
Models for Revenue Sharing in “wallgarden” networks with multiple service
providers
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Conclusions
 Several technological advances enable the
next wave of services based on:
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New UIs
Network Intelligence
Advanced personalization
User anticipation
 Advanced Services not very far out
 Business Models not clear yet
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That’s all folks!
James Schumacher [email protected]
Advanced Technology Laboratories