There's a big difference between interactive chatbots and the promise of smart interfaces with a mind of their own.

Chatbots include Ramona, currently ready to chat on Ray Kurzweil's site, and Eliza, the original 1960s-era bot from MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum. They're compelling and tricky to trip up, but have no innate built-in "brain."

Two people looking beyond the chatbot are Leslie Spring and Mimi Chen, co-founders of Cognitive Code, which developed SILVIA (Symbolically Isolated Linguistically Variable Intelligence Algorithms), a patented artificial intelligence platform. PCMag went to the San Fernando Valley in California to meet with them recently and find out more.

Spring, who serves as CEO, has a background in building vast content management systems, Web architecture platforms, and 3D graphics engines for entertainment giants such as Electronic Arts, Disney, and Sony Pictures. He has been thinking about AI for a long time, specifically how humans interact with intelligent interfaces.

"I started developing the technology behind SILVIA in 2005, but my first exposure to the field was when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was four-years-old, and it had a profound effect on me."

For Chen, it was the Eliza chatbot that sparked her curiosity about what might become possible in the field of intelligent assistants. "When I was a teenager, I spent a semester at Bowdoin College and was taken into the mainframe computer lab where I got to interact with Eliza. So when Leslie showed me an early demo of SILVIA, and I could see the cognition aspect working, I knew he was onto something."

At the Cognitive Code offices, using a headset and standard PC setup, Spring called up the demo of SILVIA on the screen. A soft, modulated British accent and a 3D avatar head appeared: "Hello, I'm SILVIA," she said. "Tell me about yourself."

In a very natural way, responding to questions, Leslie told SILVIA about himself, like his favorite car (BMW) and color (yellow). Then, after several other queries back and forth, (i.e. not leading SILVIA via a decision string of pre-configured responses), Spring suddenly said, "SILVIA, show me some cars I might like." Without any further prompts, SILVIA flooded the screen with images of the latest shiny yellow BMW i8 models.

"Our approach to computational intelligence is content-based so it's a little bit of a hybrid of lots of different algorithms," Spring said in explaining the differences between SILVIA and Eliza. "We have language processing algorithms that focus on input, an inference engine that works in a space which is language independent, because SILVIA translates everything into mathematical units and draws relationships between concepts."

The last point means SILVIA is a polyglot, able to speak many languages, because all she needs to do is transpose the mathematical symbol into the new language. Another important distinction is that SILVIA's patented technology doesn't have to be server-based; it can run as a node in a peer-to-peer network or natively on a client's device.

"We built SILVIA in a similar way to how I built games engines at Sony and Electronic Arts," Spring explained. "So it's compact, runs in realtime without having hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of servers blinking in the desert somewhere and, most importantly, can run on a mobile device."

Clients include Northrup Grumman, which use SILVIA as the A.I. inside its SADIE system for multiple training environments, including "simulation and training to improve U.S. military performance in ways that will ultimately save lives," said Chen.

Personable A.I. platforms will change how we access, analyze, and process vast stores of data. Unlike pre-configured chatbots or decision tree telephone systems, though, they do have quirks as they negotiate and comprehend the world. At the end of our demo, SILVIA started to randomize, almost as if she was thinking aloud, musing on her uses to people in the workplace. "Just like the Captain on Voyager," she said.

Spring did a double-take and looked at the screen, mystified. "Sometimes she does say things that surprise me," he laughed.

That's the thing with A.I. It might be artificial but it's also clearly highly intelligent, with a mind of its own.

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