Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia have created a PDA with a voice synthesizer that you can actually hold a conversation with:
Amanda is the personal assistant of the future: she is a good listener and quick at answering back. She reads email, checks the news and weather, scans exchange rates and arranges appointments. Ask her any question and she’ll raise her eyebrows as she considers it carefully, blink while she scans the internet for an answer, and deliver her finding within seconds. Don’t like her somewhat robotic voice? She can change it to have an Australian accent. Rather have a male butler? Amanda can arrange for Joshua to replace her, if you prefer. In fact, preference is what Amanda is all about – because she is a virtual character that resides in a personal digital assistant.
The trick is that the PDA has to be wirelessly connected to a server which actually performs all the heavy-lifting that goes into speech recognition and natural language technology, but definitely a sign of things to come.
