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ORION
What is Orion?
What does Orion know?
How do I talk to Orion?
How do I call Orion?
How does Orion work?
What is Orion?
Orion is a conversational system that performs off-line tasks and
initiates later contact with a user at a pre-negotiated time, to
deliver timely information. Orion has two major episodes of activity:
the enrollment of new tasks and the execution of pending tasks. The
user can enroll a task either by typing at a graphical interface or by
calling Orion on the telephone. Orion will solicit the necessary
information to fill out all the particulars of the task, including
phone number and time(s) to call, and the information to provide
during the call-back. The execution of pending tasks may involve
monitoring dynamic information sources, such as the predicted arrival
time of a flight or the traffic conditions on a specific highway.
What does Orion know?
Orion has a wide base of knowledge, because it draws on information
provided by other systems. For example, it can provide traffic
reports, report weather conditions, and determine when a particular
flight is expected to land. It can also simply record a spoken
message for later delivery, either to the person who spoke it or to
someone else. It understands a variety of questions about reminders,
such as to take medicine or to pick up a son at soccer practice. It
can be very useful as an alarm clock, while at the same time
providing, for example, a weather report for the day or a status
report on the traffic on the commute to work.
How do I talk to Orion?
Orion is still in its infancy, so it may only know a limited
number of ways of refering to a particular request. It works most
effectively if your speech is fluent, with very few hesitations,
etc. We are actively working on improving Orion's robustness.
When accessing Orion via a Web Browser, a user can check on their
pending tasks, and make any changes to a particular task by clicking
on it with the mouse and following up with instructions for the
adjustment, which could be, for example to change the wake-up call
time.
Below are some example queries that Orion currently understands.
- Call me at 4:30 to remind me to call my mother.
- Send me email every weekday morning if the traffic on route 93 is
at a standstill.
- Call me when flight ninety two lands in Dallas.
How do I call Orion?
Orion is not available to the public at this time. Stay tuned.
How does Orion
work? As are all of our current systems, Orion utilizes a
set of core speech
technologies which are integrated with the GALAXY client-server
architecture, our platform for system development. Two separate Orion
dialogue managers control
the tasks of enrolling new tasks and executing existing tasks,
respectively. The task-enrollment server engages a user in a dialogue
to fill out a form for a new task to be performed, or to modify or
delete a pre-existing task. The task-execution server periodically
updates all pending tasks, re-evaluating dynamic information, such as
the status of a particular flight, when appropriate. It communicates
with other domain servers, such as the Pegasus system for flight
status and the Voyager
system for traffic updates, via questions posed in English text. It
issues a call-back or sends e-mail to a user, according to the
instructions provided in the specified task form. Orion is still in
an early stage of its development cycle, but it has introduced several
interesting new research issues, such as continuous state maintenance
and contact verification.
Comments or questions to bug-galaxy@lists.csail.mit.edu
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