AI Assistant Jarvis

AI Assistant Jarvis — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • Tweak programming environment

    Tweak programming environment

    Tweak is a graphical user interface (GUI) layer written by Andreas Raab for the Squeak development environment, which in turn is an integrated development environment based on the Smalltalk-80 computer programming language. Tweak is an alternative to an earlier graphic user interface layer called Morphic. Development began in 2001. Applications that use the Tweak software include Sophie (version 1), a multimedia and e-book authoring system, and a family of virtual world systems: Open Cobalt, Teleplace, OpenQwaq, 3d ICC's Immersive Terf and the Croquet Project. == Influences == An experimental version of Etoys, a programming environment for children, used Tweak instead of Morphic. Etoys was a major influence on a similar Squeak-based programming environment known as Scratch.

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  • Oren Etzioni

    Oren Etzioni

    Oren Etzioni (born 1964) is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington, and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). Etzioni is a co-founder of Vercept, an AI startup, and founder and CEO of TrueMedia.org, a non-profit dedicated to fighting political deepfakes, which launched in April 2024. He is also the Founder and Technical Director of the AI2 Incubator and a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group. == Early life and education == Etzioni is the son of Israeli-American intellectual Amitai Etzioni. He was the first student to major in computer science at Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1986. He earned a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in January, 1991, supervised by Tom M. Mitchell. == University of Washington career == Etzioni joined the University of Washington faculty in 1991, immediately after receiving his PhD. He rose through the ranks to become the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Professor in Computer Science & Engineering. Etzioni's research has been focused on basic problems in the study of intelligence, machine reading, machine learning and web search. Past projects include Internet Softbots—the study of intelligent agents in the context of real-world software testbeds. In 2003, he started the KnowItAll project for acquiring massive amounts of information from the web. In 2005, he founded and became the director of the university's Turing Center. The center investigated problems in data mining, natural language processing, the Semantic Web and other web search topics. Etzioni coined the term machine reading and helped to create the first commercial comparison shopping agent. He has published over 200 technical papers, and his H-index exceeds 100. == Entrepreneurship == As a faculty member Etzioni was also an active entrepreneur, founding multiple companies and pioneering multiple technologies including MetaCrawler (bought by Infospace), Netbot (bought by Excite in 1997 for $35 million), and ClearForest (bought by Reuters). He founded Farecast, a travel metasearch and price prediction site, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008 for $115 million. Before founding Farecast, he developed a program originally called Hamlet, that used algorithms to identify patterns in airfare data using data-mining techniques. He also co-founded Decide.com, a website to help consumers make buying decisions using previous price history and recommendations from other users. Decide.com was bought by eBay in September, 2013. Etzioni is also a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group. He is founder and CEO of TrueMedia.org, a non-profit dedicated to fighting political deepfakes, which launched in April 2024. Etzioni is a co-founder of Vercept, an AI startup formed in 2025. == Founding CEO of AI2 == In September 2013 Etzioni was selected as the Founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence by philanthropist Paul G. Allen, and in January 2014 he took a leave of absence from the University of Washington to serve in that role. Etzioni's technical contributions continued at AI2; for example, in 2015, he helped to create the Semantic Scholar search engine. Under Etzioni’s leadership, AI2 grew from zero to over two hundred team members including notable researchers and engineers across several domains of AI. By 2021, its AI2 researchers had published near 700 papers in publications such as AAAI, ACL, CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICLR. Twenty-four of these papers had garnered special-recognition awards. AI2 also offered several key resources and tools to the AI community including the AllenNLP library, Semantic Scholar, and the conservation platforms EarthRanger and Skylight. Ed Lazowska, AI2 Board Member, has stated about Etzioni that he "took the collegial, collaborative culture that he absorbed in his 20+ years as a professor in UW's Allen School and mixed it with the singular focus that drives startups to create an elixir that AI2 folks have been drinking over the last eight years. The result is an exceptional organization of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs that's pursuing Paul Allen’s vision of ‘AI for the Common Good’ with extraordinary success.” == Popular press == In addition to his scientific publications, Etzioni has written commentary on AI for The New York Times, Wired, Nature, and other publications. After reading the idea in a book about AI by Brad Smith and Harry Shum, Etzioni has attempted to create an oath for AI practitioners. In 2018, he published what he called a "Hippocratic Oath for artificial intelligence practitioners" in TechCrunch. == Awards and recognition == In 1993, Etzioni received a National Young Investigator Award. In 2003, Etzioni was elected as AAAI Fellow. In 2005, Etzioni received an IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award for "A Probabilistic Model of Redundancy in Information Extraction". In 2007, he received the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award. In 2012 Etzioni was featured as GeekWire's "Geek of the Week". In 2013 Etzioni was voted "Geek of the Year" through GeekWire. In 2022, Etzioni received the 2012 ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award. In 2022, Etzioni, along with Ana-Maria Popescu and Henry Kautz, received the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces Most Impact Award for their 2003 paper, "Towards a Theory of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases". == Personal life == Etzioni has three children, and has said in interviews that family is his number one priority. He is married to Ivone Etzioni, and was previously married to Dr. Ruth Etzioni, a biostatistician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Outside of his professional career, Etzioni has a wide range of personal interests. He has attended the Burning Man festival, which he described as a valuable way to step outside his comfort zone. His first computer was a TRS-80, and he has described his car’s GPS as his favorite gadget, joking that he has “no sense of direction.” == Selected publications == === Scholarly publications === Etzioni, Oren (July 1994). "A Softbot-based Interface to the Internet" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. Retrieved March 29, 2018. Etzioni, Oren (December 2008). "Open Information Extraction from the Web" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. Retrieved March 29, 2018. Zamir, Oren; Etzioni, Oren (1998). "Web document clustering". Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. ACM. pp. 46–54. doi:10.1145/290941.290956. ISBN 978-1-58113-015-7. S2CID 244069. Zamir, Oren; Etzioni, Oren (May 1999). "Grouper: a dynamic clustering interface to Web search results". Computer Networks. 31 (11–16): 1361–1374. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.31.8216. doi:10.1016/S1389-1286(99)00054-7. S2CID 206134308. Popescu, Ana-Maria; Etzioni, Oren (2005). "Extracting product features and opinions from reviews". Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - HLT '05. pp. 339–346. doi:10.3115/1220575.1220618. Etzioni, Oren; Cafarella, Michael; Downey, Doug; Popescu, Ana-Maria; Shaked, Tal; Sonderland, Stephen; Weld, Daniel; Yates, Alexander (June 2005). "Unsupervised named-entity extraction from the Web: An experimental study". Artificial Intelligence. 165 (1): 91–134. doi:10.1016/j.artint.2005.03.001. Downey, Doug; Etzioni, Oren; Sonderland, Stephen (July 2010). "Grouper: Analysis of a probabilistic model of redundancy in unsupervised information extraction". Artificial Intelligence. 174 (11): 726–748. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.174.2441. doi:10.1016/j.artint.2010.04.024. === Popular articles === Etzioni, Oren (August 4, 2011). "Web Search Needs a Shakeup" (PDF). Nature. Retrieved November 21, 2019. Etzioni, Oren (December 9, 2014). "AI Won't Exterminate Us – It Will Empower Us". Backchannel. Retrieved March 29, 2018. Etzioni, Oren (February 4, 2016). "To Keep AI Safe -- Use AI". Vox. Retrieved November 21, 2019. Etzioni, Oren (April 8, 2016). "Quora Session with Oren Etzioni". Quora. Retrieved March 29, 2018. Etzioni, Oren (June 15, 2016). "Deep Learning Isn't a Dangerous Magic Genie. It's Just Math". Wired. Retrieved March 29, 2018. Etzioni, Oren (September 20, 2016). "No, the Experts Don't Think Superintelligent AI is a Threat to Humanity". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved November 21, 2019. Etzioni, Oren (July 6, 2017). "Artificial intelligence: AI Zooms in on highly influential citations". Nature. Retrieved March 29, 2018. Etzioni, Oren (September 1, 2017). "How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence". The New York Times. Retrieved March 29, 2018. Etzioni, Oren (November 2, 2017). "Workers Displaced by Automation Should Try A New Job: Caregiver". Wired. Retrieved March 29, 2018. Etzioni, Oren (March 14, 2018). "A Hippocratic Oath for artificial intelligence practitioners". Tech Crunch. Retrieved March 29, 2018. Etzioni, Oren (March 7, 2018). "A 'Manhattan Project' for science research". The Hill. Retrieved November 21, 2019. Etzioni, Ore

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  • Interlingual machine translation

    Interlingual machine translation

    Interlingual machine translation is one of the classic approaches to machine translation. In this approach, the source language, i.e. the text to be translated is transformed into an interlingua, i.e., an abstract language-independent representation. The target language is then generated from the interlingua. Within the rule-based machine translation paradigm, the interlingual approach is an alternative to the direct approach and the transfer approach. In the direct approach, words are translated directly without passing through an additional representation. In the transfer approach the source language is transformed into an abstract, less language-specific representation. Linguistic rules which are specific to the language pair then transform the source language representation into an abstract target language representation and from this the target sentence is generated. The interlingual approach to machine translation has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that it requires fewer components in order to relate each source language to each target language, it takes fewer components to add a new language, it supports paraphrases of the input in the original language, it allows both the analysers and generators to be written by monolingual system developers, and it handles languages that are very different from each other (e.g. English and Arabic). The obvious disadvantage is that the definition of an interlingua is difficult and maybe even impossible for a wider domain. The ideal context for interlingual machine translation is thus multilingual machine translation in a very specific domain. For example, Interlingua has been used as a pivot language in international conferences and has been proposed as a pivot language for the European Union. == History == The first ideas about interlingual machine translation appeared in the 17th century with Descartes and Leibniz, who came up with theories of how to create dictionaries using universal numerical codes, not unlike numerical tokens used by large language models nowadays. Others, such as Cave Beck, Athanasius Kircher and Johann Joachim Becher worked on developing an unambiguous universal language based on the principles of logic and iconographs. In 1668, John Wilkins described his interlingua in his "Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language". In the 18th and 19th centuries many proposals for "universal" international languages were developed, the most well known being Esperanto. That said, applying the idea of a universal language to machine translation did not appear in any of the first significant approaches. Instead, work started on pairs of languages. However, during the 1950s and 60s, researchers in Cambridge headed by Margaret Masterman, in Leningrad headed by Nikolai Andreev and in Milan by Silvio Ceccato started work in this area. The idea was discussed extensively by the Israeli philosopher Yehoshua Bar-Hillel in 1969. During the 1970s, noteworthy research was done in Grenoble by researchers attempting to translate physics and mathematical texts from Russian to French, and in Texas a similar project (METAL) was ongoing for Russian to English. Early interlingual MT systems were also built at Stanford in the 1970s by Roger Schank and Yorick Wilks; the former became the basis of a commercial system for the transfer of funds, and the latter's code is preserved at The Computer Museum at Boston as the first interlingual machine translation system. In the 1980s, renewed relevance was given to interlingua-based, and knowledge-based approaches to machine translation in general, with much research going on in the field. The uniting factor in this research was that high-quality translation required abandoning the idea of requiring total comprehension of the text. Instead, the translation should be based on linguistic knowledge and the specific domain in which the system would be used. The most important research of this era was done in distributed language translation (DLT) in Utrecht, which worked with a modified version of Esperanto, and the Fujitsu system in Japan. In 2016, Google Neural Machine Translation achieved "zero-shot translation", that is it directly translates one language into another. For example, it might be trained just for Japanese-English and Korean-English translation, but can perform Japanese-Korean translation. The system appears to have learned to produce a language-independent intermediate representation of language (an "interlingua"), which allows it to perform zero-shot translation by converting from and to the interlingua. == Outline == In this method of translation, the interlingua can be thought of as a way of describing the analysis of a text written in a source language such that it is possible to convert its morphological, syntactic, semantic (and even pragmatic) characteristics, that is "meaning" into a target language. This interlingua is able to describe all of the characteristics of all of the languages which are to be translated, instead of simply translating from one language to another. Sometimes two interlinguas are used in translation. It is possible that one of the two covers more of the characteristics of the source language, and the other possess more of the characteristics of the target language. The translation then proceeds by converting sentences from the first language into sentences closer to the target language through two stages. The system may also be set up such that the second interlingua uses a more specific vocabulary that is closer, or more aligned with the target language, and this could improve the translation quality. The above-mentioned system is based on the idea of using linguistic proximity to improve the translation quality from a text in one original language to many other structurally similar languages from only one original analysis. This principle is also used in pivot machine translation, where a natural language is used as a "bridge" between two more distant languages. For example, in the case of translating to English from Ukrainian using Russian as an intermediate language. == Translation process == In interlingual machine translation systems, there are two monolingual components: the analysis of the source language and the interlingual, and the generation of the interlingua and the target language. It is however necessary to distinguish between interlingual systems using only syntactic methods (for example the systems developed in the 1970s at the universities of Grenoble and Texas) and those based on artificial intelligence (from 1987 in Japan and the research at the universities of Southern California and Carnegie Mellon). The first type of system corresponds to that outlined in Figure 1. while the other types would be approximated by the diagram in Figure 4. The following resources are necessary to an interlingual machine translation system: Dictionaries (or lexicons) for analysis and generation (specific to the domain and the languages involved). A conceptual lexicon (specific to the domain), which is the knowledge base about events and entities known in the domain. A set of projection rules (specific to the domain and the languages). Grammars for the analysis and generation of the languages involved. One of the problems of knowledge-based machine translation systems is that it becomes impossible to create databases for domains larger than very specific areas. Another is that processing these databases is very computationally expensive. == Efficacy == One of the main advantages of this strategy is that it provides an economical way to make multilingual translation systems. With an interlingua it becomes unnecessary to make a translation pair between each pair of languages in the system. So instead of creating n ( n − 1 ) {\displaystyle n(n-1)} language pairs, where n {\displaystyle n} is the number of languages in the system, it is only necessary to make 2 n {\displaystyle 2n} pairs between the n {\displaystyle n} languages and the interlingua. The main disadvantage of this strategy is the difficulty of creating an adequate interlingua. It should be both abstract and independent of the source and target languages. The more languages added to the translation system, and the more different they are, the more potent the interlingua must be to express all possible translation directions. Another problem is that it is difficult to extract meaning from texts in the original languages to create the intermediate representation. == Existing interlingual machine translation systems == Calliope-Aero Carabao Linguistic Virtual Machine Grammatical Framework Number Translator Google Translate use English internally as a pivot language for some language pairs such as Chinese and Japanese, and more generally those with "higher quality" neural-network translators with English but not between each other.

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  • Clement Farabet

    Clement Farabet

    Clément Farabet is a computer scientist and AI expert known for his contributions to the field of deep learning. He served as a research scientist at the New York University. He serves as the Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind and previously served as the VP of AI Infrastructure at NVIDIA. His scholarly work received over 11,000 citations with an h-index of 21. == Education == In 2008, Farabet earned a master's degree in electrical engineering with honors from Institut national des sciences appliquées (INSA) de Lyon, France. In 2010, Farabet received his PhD at Université Paris-Est, co-advised by Professors Laurent Najman and Yann LeCun. His thesis focused on real-time image understanding and introduced multi-scale convolutional networks and graph-based techniques for efficient segmentations of class prediction maps. He successfully defended his thesis in 2013. == Career == In 2008, after completing his Master's degree, Farabet joined Professor Yann LeCun's laboratory at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. His Master's thesis work on reconfigurable hardware for deep neural networks resulted in a patent. He continued his collaboration with Yann LeCun, and in 2009, he began working with Yale University's e-Lab, led by Eugenio Culurciello. This collaboration eventually led to the creation of TeraDeep. He began his career as a researcher, contributing to the development of LuaTorch, one of the first AI frameworks, which later evolved into PyTorch, widely recognized and adopted globally. == Startups == Farabet co-founded MadBits, a startup with a focus on web-scale image understanding. The company was acquired by Twitter in 2014. Following this acquisition, Farabet co-founded Twitter Cortex, a team dedicated to building Twitter's deep learning platform for various applications, including recommendations, search, spam detection, and NSFW content and ads. == Publications == Farabet, Clement; Couprie, Camille; Najman, Laurent; LeCun, Yann (August 2013). "Learning Hierarchical Features for Scene Labeling". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 35 (8): 1915–1929. Bibcode:2013ITPAM..35.1915F. doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2012.231. PMID 23787344. S2CID 206765110. LeCun, Yann; Kavukcuoglu, Koray; Farabet, Clement (2010). "Convolutional networks and applications in vision". Proceedings of 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. pp. 253–256. doi:10.1109/ISCAS.2010.5537907. ISBN 978-1-4244-5308-5. S2CID 7625356. Collobert, Ronan; Kavukcuoglu, K.; Farabet, C. (2011). "Torch7: A Matlab-like Environment for Machine Learning". Neural Information Processing Systems. Couprie, Camille; Farabet, Clément; Najman, Laurent; LeCun, Yann (16 January 2013). "Indoor Semantic Segmentation using depth information". arXiv:1301.3572 [cs.CV]. Farabet, Clement (2011). "NeuFlow: A runtime reconfigurable dataflow processor for vision". CVPR 2011 Workshops. pp. 109–116. doi:10.1109/CVPRW.2011.5981829. ISBN 978-1-4577-0529-8. S2CID 851574. Farabet, Clement (2009). "CNP: An FPGA-based processor for Convolutional Networks". 2009 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications. pp. 32–37. doi:10.1109/FPL.2009.5272559. S2CID 5339694. Farabet, Clement (2010). "Hardware accelerated convolutional neural networks for synthetic vision systems". Proceedings of 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. pp. 257–260. doi:10.1109/ISCAS.2010.5537908. ISBN 978-1-4244-5308-5. S2CID 6542026.

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  • Research software engineering

    Research software engineering

    Research software engineering is the application of software engineering practices, methods and techniques for research software, i.e. software that was made for and is mainly used within research projects. As usual for software engineering, this also includes knowledge of other (and in this case varying) research fields as well as open science that need to be incorporated into a software development process. The term was proposed in a research paper in 2010 in response to an empirical survey on tools used for software development in research projects. It started to be used in United Kingdom in 2012, when it was needed to define the type of software development needed in research. This focuses on reproducibility, reusability, and accuracy of data analysis and applications created for research. == Support == Various type of associations and organisations have been created around this role to support the creation of posts in universities and research institutes. In 2014 a Research Software Engineer Association was created in UK, which attracted 160 members in the first three months and which lead to the creation of the Society of Research Software Engineering in 2019. Other countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and the USA followed creating similar communities and there are similar efforts being pursued in Asia, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and Belgium. In January 2021 the International Council of RSE Associations was introduced. UK counts over 40 universities and institutes with groups that provide access to software expertise to different areas of research. Additionally, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council created a Research Software Engineer fellowship to promote this role and help the creation of RSE groups across UK, with calls in 2015, 2017, and 2020. The world first RSE conference took place in UK in September 2016 and it has been repeated annually (except for a gap in 2020) since. In 2019 the first national RSE conferences in Germany and the Netherlands were held, next editions were planned for 2020 and then cancelled. US-RSE held its first national conference in 2023. The Research Software Alliance was formed in 2019 to advance the global research software ecosystem by collaborating with decision makers and key influencers. The SORSE (A Series of Online Research Software Events) community was established in late‑2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and ran its first online event in September 2020.

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  • Is an AI Art Generator Worth It in 2026?

    Is an AI Art Generator Worth It in 2026?

    Curious about the best AI art generator? An AI art generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI art generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

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  • Hans Uszkoreit

    Hans Uszkoreit

    Hans Uszkoreit is a German computational linguist. Hans Uszkoreit studied Linguistics and Computer Science at Technische Universität Berlin and the University of Texas at Austin. While he was studying in Austin, he also worked as a research associate in a large machine translation project at the Linguistics Research Center. After he received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas, he worked as a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center and was affiliated with the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. Nowadays, he is teaching as a professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. Moreover, he serves as a Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Lab. == Life and career == Hans Uszkoreit, a native of East Berlin, was actively involved in a group of young individuals who opposed the East Germany regime. His protesting against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia led to his expulsion from high school and subsequent imprisonment for a period of fifteen months on charges of subversive agitation. Realizing that continuing his education in East Germany was not feasible, Uszkoreit made the decision to escape to West Berlin. There, he completed his high school education and pursued a degree in Linguistics and Computer Science at Technische Universität Berlin. During his time as a student, he worked part-time as an editor and writer for Zitty, a city magazine, which he co-founded. In 1977, Uszkoreit was granted a Fulbright Grant to further his studies at the University of Texas at Austin. During his time in Austin, he concurrently served as a research associate in a significant machine translation project. Subsequently, he received a second Fulbright grant, which enabled him to pursue a Ph.D. program in linguistics. In 1984, he successfully completed his doctoral studies, earning a Ph.D. in linguistics. Between 1982 and 1986, Uszkoreit held the position of a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International in Menlo Park, California. In 1988, he created the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics at Saarland University. In 1989 he was elected head of the Language Technology Lab at DFKI. In 2012, Uszkoreit's achievements in the domain of relation extraction led to his receipt of a Google Faculty Research Award, acknowledging the substantial progress made by Uszkoreit and his team in advancing the field. In 2013, Uszkoreit, in collaboration with Feiyu Xu and Roberto Navigli, was granted an additional Google Research Award, which provided support for a targeted project within Google's Language Understanding Program, focusing on the augmentation of language comprehension and analysis. == Personal life == He is father of a son Jakob Uszkoreit, machine learning researcher scientist, an author of the landmark paper "Attention Is All You Need", and daughter Lena Uszkoreit. == Awards == 2002 Elected Member of the European Academy of Sciences 2012 Google Faculty Research Award 2013 Google Focused Research Award

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  • Is an AI Paraphrasing Tool Worth It in 2026?

    Is an AI Paraphrasing Tool Worth It in 2026?

    Curious about the best AI paraphrasing tool? An AI paraphrasing tool is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it combines speed, accuracy, and an interface that just works. Hands-on testing shows real-world results vary, so a short free trial is the smartest way to decide. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI paraphrasing tool slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.

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  • Dr. Sbaitso

    Dr. Sbaitso

    Dr. Sbaitso ( SPAYT-soh) is an artificial intelligence speech synthesis program released late in 1991 by Creative Labs in Singapore for MS-DOS-based personal computers. The name is an acronym for "SoundBlaster Acting Intelligent Text-to-Speech Operator." == History == Dr. Sbaitso was distributed with various sound cards manufactured by Creative Technology in the early 1990s. The text-to-speech engine used is a version of Monologue, which was developed by First Byte Software. Monologue is a later release of First Byte's "SmoothTalker" software from 1984. The program "conversed" with the user as if it were a psychologist, though most of its responses were along the lines of "WHY DO YOU FEEL THAT WAY?" rather than any sort of complicated interaction. When confronted with a phrase it could not understand, it would often reply with something such as "THAT'S NOT MY PROBLEM." Dr. Sbaitso repeated text out loud that was typed after the word "SAY." Repeated swearing or abusive behavior on the part of the user caused Dr. Sbaitso to "break down" in a "PARITY ERROR" before resetting itself. The same would happen, if the user types "SAY PARITY." The program introduced itself with the following lines: HELLO [UserName], MY NAME IS DOCTOR SBAITSO. I AM HERE TO HELP YOU. SAY WHATEVER IS IN YOUR MIND FREELY, OUR CONVERSATION WILL BE KEPT IN STRICT CONFIDENCE. MEMORY CONTENTS WILL BE WIPED OFF AFTER YOU LEAVE, SO, TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS. The program was designed to showcase the digitized voices the cards were able to produce, though the quality was far from lifelike. Additionally, there was a version of this program for Microsoft Windows through the use of a program called Prody Parrot; this version of the software featured a more detailed graphical user interface. The text-to-speech was also used as the voice of 1st Prize from the Baldi's Basics series, albeit slowed down. == Commands == If the user submits "HELP", a list of commands will appear. If the user then submits "M", more commands will appear. There are three pages of commands in total, with guidance on how to use each of the features.

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  • Vlado Keselj

    Vlado Keselj

    Vlado Keselj (Vlado Kešelj) is a Serbian-Canadian computer scientist known for his research in natural language processing and authorship attribution. He is a professor at Dalhousie University. == Education == As a high school student in Yugoslavia, Keselj competed in the 1987 International Mathematical Olympiad, earning a bronze medal. He earned his Ph.D. in 2002 at the University of Waterloo, with the dissertation Modular Stochastic HPSGs for Question Answering supervised by Nick Cercone. == Awards == Vlado Keselj is a recipient of the 2019 CAIAC Distinguished Service Award, awarded by the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC). == Selected publications == Kešelj, V., Peng, F., Cercone, N., & Thomas, C. (2003, August). N-gram-based author profiles for authorship attribution. In Proceedings of the Conference of the Pacific Association for Computational Linguistics, PACLING 2003 (Vol. 3, pp. 255–264).

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  • Best AI Humanizers in 2026

    Best AI Humanizers in 2026

    Shopping for the best AI humanizer? An AI humanizer is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI humanizer slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.

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  • How to Choose an AI Paraphrasing Tool

    How to Choose an AI Paraphrasing Tool

    Looking for the best AI paraphrasing tool? An AI paraphrasing tool is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it can save you hours every week by automating repetitive work. Most options offer a generous free tier, with paid plans unlocking higher limits, faster processing, and team features. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI paraphrasing tool slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. This guide breaks down the top picks, their pros and cons, and who each one is best for.

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  • Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine

    Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine

    The Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine (sometimes called the Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine or MENACE) was a mechanical computer made from 304 matchboxes designed and built by artificial intelligence researcher Donald Michie and his colleague Roger Chambers, in 1961. It was designed to play human opponents in games of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) by returning a move for any given state of play and to refine its strategy through reinforcement learning. This was one of the first types of artificial intelligence. Michie and Chambers did not have immediate access to a computer; they worked around this by building the engine out of matchboxes. The matchboxes they used each represented a single possible layout of a noughts and crosses grid. When the computer first played, it would randomly choose moves based on the current layout. As it played more games, through a reinforcement loop, it disqualified strategies that led to losing games, and supplemented strategies that led to winning games. Michie held a tournament against MENACE in 1961, wherein he experimented with different openings. Following MENACE's maiden tournament against Michie, it demonstrated successful artificial intelligence in its strategy. Michie's essays on MENACE's weight initialisation and the BOXES algorithm used by MENACE became popular in the field of computer science research. Michie was honoured for his contribution to machine learning research, and was twice commissioned to program a MENACE simulation on an actual computer. == Origin == Donald Michie (1923–2007) had been on the team decrypting the German Tunny Code during World War II. Fifteen years later, he wanted to further display his mathematical and computational prowess with an early convolutional neural network. Since computer equipment was not obtainable for such uses, and Michie did not have a computer readily available, he decided to display and demonstrate artificial intelligence in a more esoteric format and constructed a functional mechanical computer out of matchboxes and beads. MENACE was constructed as the result of a bet with a computer science colleague who postulated that such a machine was impossible. Michie undertook the task of collecting and defining each matchbox as a "fun project", later turned into a demonstration tool. Michie completed his essay on MENACE in 1963, "Experiments on the mechanization of game-learning", as well as his essay on the BOXES Algorithm, written with R. A. Chambers and had built up an AI research unit in Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, Scotland. MENACE learned by playing successive matches of noughts and crosses. Each time, it would eliminate a losing strategy by the human player confiscating the beads that corresponded to each move. It reinforced winning strategies by making the moves more likely, by supplying extra beads. This was one of the earliest versions of the Reinforcement Loop, the schematic algorithm of looping the algorithm, dropping unsuccessful strategies until only the winning ones remain. This model starts as completely random, and gradually learns. == Composition == MENACE was made from 304 matchboxes glued together in an arrangement similar to a chest of drawers. Each box had a code number, which was keyed into a chart. This chart had drawings of tic-tac-toe game grids with various configurations of X, O, and empty squares, corresponding to all possible permutations a game could go through as it progressed. After removing duplicate arrangements (ones that were simply rotations or mirror images of other configurations), MENACE used 304 permutations in its chart and thus that many matchboxes. Each individual matchbox tray contained a collection of coloured beads. Each colour represented a move on a square on the game grid, and so matchboxes with arrangements where positions on the grid were already taken would not have beads for that position. Additionally, at the front of the tray were two extra pieces of card in a "V" shape, the point of the "V" pointing at the front of the matchbox. Michie and his artificial intelligence team called MENACE's algorithm "Boxes", after the apparatus used for the machine. The first stage "Boxes" operated in five phases, each setting a definition and a precedent for the rules of the algorithm in relation to the game. == Operation == MENACE played first, as O, since all matchboxes represented permutations only relevant to the "X" player. To retrieve MENACE's choice of move, the opponent or operator located the matchbox that matched the current game state, or a rotation or mirror image of it. For example, at the start of a game, this would be the matchbox for an empty grid. The tray would be removed and lightly shaken so as to move the beads around. Then, the bead that had rolled into the point of the "V" shape at the front of the tray was the move MENACE had chosen to make. Its colour was then used as the position to play on, and, after accounting for any rotations or flips needed based on the chosen matchbox configuration's relation to the current grid, the O would be placed on that square. Then the player performed their move, the new state was located, a new move selected, and so on, until the game was finished. When the game had finished, the human player observed the game's outcome. As a game was played, each matchbox that was used for MENACE's turn had its tray returned to it ajar, and the bead used kept aside, so that MENACE's choice of moves and the game states they belonged to were recorded. Michie described his reinforcement system with "reward" and "punishment". Once the game was finished, if MENACE had won, it would then receive a "reward" for its victory. The removed beads showed the sequence of the winning moves. These were returned to their respective trays, easily identifiable since they were slightly open, as well as three bonus beads of the same colour. In this way, in future games MENACE would become more likely to repeat those winning moves, reinforcing winning strategies. If it lost, the removed beads were not returned, "punishing" MENACE, and meaning that in future it would be less likely, and eventually incapable if that colour of bead became absent, to repeat the moves that cause a loss. If the game was a draw, one additional bead was added to each box. == Results in practice == === Optimal strategy === Noughts and crosses has a well-known optimal strategy. A player must place their symbol in a way that blocks the other player from achieving any rows while simultaneously making a row themself. However, if both players use this strategy, the game always ends in a draw. If the human player is familiar with the optimal strategy, and MENACE can quickly learn it, then the games will eventually only end in draws. The likelihood of the computer winning increases quickly when the computer plays against a random-playing opponent. When playing against a player using optimal strategy, the odds of a draw grow to 100%. In Donald Michie's official tournament against MENACE in 1961 he used optimal strategy, and he and the computer began to draw consistently after twenty games. Michie's tournament had the following milestones: Michie began by consistently opening with "Variant 0", the middle square. At 15 games, MENACE abandoned all non-corner openings. At just over 20, Michie switched to consistently using "Variant 1", the bottom-right square. At 60, he returned to Variant 0. As he neared 80 games, he moved to "Variant 2", the top-middle. At 110, he switched to "Variant 3", the top right. At 135, he switched to "Variant 4", middle-right. At 190, he returned to Variant 1, and at 210, he returned to Variant 0. The trend in changes of beads in the "2" boxes runs: === Correlation === Depending on the strategy employed by the human player, MENACE produces a different trend on scatter graphs of wins. Using a random turn from the human player results in an almost-perfect positive trend. Playing the optimal strategy returns a slightly slower increase. The reinforcement does not create a perfect standard of wins; the algorithm will draw random uncertain conclusions each time. After the j-th round, the correlation of near-perfect play runs: 1 − D D − D ( j + 2 ) ∑ i = 0 j D ( j i + 1 ) V i {\displaystyle {1-D \over D-D^{(j+2)}}\sum _{i=0}^{j}D^{(ji+1)}V_{i}} Where Vi is the outcome (+1 is win, 0 is draw and -1 is loss) and D is the decay factor (average of past values of wins and losses). Below, Mn is the multiplier for the n-th round of the game. == Legacy == Donald Michie's MENACE proved that a computer could learn from failure and success to become good at a task. It used what would become core principles within the field of machine learning before they had been properly theorised. For example, the combination of how MENACE starts with equal numbers of types of beads in each matchbox, and how these are then selected at random, creates a learning behaviour similar to weight initialisation

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  • AI Content Generators: Free vs Paid (2026)

    AI Content Generators: Free vs Paid (2026)

    Shopping for the best AI content generator? An AI content generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI content generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.

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  • Phraselator

    Phraselator

    The Phraselator is a weatherproof handheld language translation device developed by Applied Data Systems and VoxTec, a former division of the military contractor Marine Acoustics, located in Annapolis, Maryland, USA. It was designed to serve as a handheld computer device that translates English into one of 40 different languages. == The device == The Phraselator is a small speech translation PDA-sized device designed to aid in interpretation. The device does not produce synthesized speech like that utilized by Stephen Hawking; instead, it plays pre-recorded foreign language MP3 files. Users can select the phrase they wish to convey from an English list on the screen or speak into the device. It then uses speech recognition technology called DynaSpeak, developed by SRI International, to play the proper sound file. The accuracy of the speech recognition software is over 70 percent according to software developer Jack Buchanan. The device can also record replies for translation later. Pre-recorded phrases are stored on Secure Digital flash memory cards. A 128 MB card can hold up to 12,000 phrases in four or five languages. Users can download phrase modules from the official website, which contained over 300,000 phrases as of March 2005. Users can also construct their own custom phrase modules. Earlier devices were known to have run on an SA-1110 Strong Arm 206 MHz CPU with 32MB SDRAM and 32MB onboard Flash RAM. A newer model, the P2, was released in 2004 and developed according to feedback from U.S. soldiers. It translates one way from English to approximately 60 other languages. It has a directional microphone, a larger library of phrases and a longer battery life. The 2004 release was created by and utilizes a computer board manufactured by InHand Electronics, Inc. In the future, the device will be able to display pictures so users can ask questions such as "Have you seen this person?" Developer Ace Sarich notes that the device is inferior to human interpreter. Conclusions derived from a Nepal field test conducted by U.S. and Nepal based NGO Himalayan Aid in 2004 seemed to confirm Sarich's comparisons: The very concept of using a machine as a communication point between individuals seemed to actually encourage a more limited form of interaction between tester and respondent. Usually, when limited language skills are present between parties, the genuine struggle and desire to communicate acts as a display of good will – we openly display our weakness in this regard – and the result is a more relaxed and human encounter. This was not necessarily present with the Phraselator as all parties abandoned learning about each other and instead focused on learning how to work with the device. As a tool for bridging any cultural differences or communicating effectively at any length, the Phraselator would not be recommended. This device, at least in the form tested, would best be used in large-scale operations where there is no time for language training and there is a need to communicate fixed ideas, quickly, over the greatest distance by employing large amounts of unskilled users. Large humanitarian or natural disasters in remote areas of third-world countries might be an effective example. == Origin == The original idea for the device came from Lee Morin, a Navy doctor in Operation Desert Storm. To communicate with patients, he played Arabic audio files from his laptop. He informed Ace Sarich, the vice president of VoxTec, about the idea. VoxTec won a DARPA Small Business Innovation Research grant in early 2001 to develop a military-grade handheld phrase translator. During its development, the Phraselator was tested and evaluated by scientists from the Army Research Laboratory. The device was first field tested in Afghanistan in 2001. By 2002, about 500 Phraselators were built for soldiers around the world with another 250 ordered by the U.S. Special Forces. The device cost $2000 to develop and could convert spoken English into one of 200,000 recorded commands and questions in 30 languages. However, the device could only translate one-way. At the time, the only existing two-way voice translator that could convert speech back and forth between languages was the Audio Voice Translation Guide System, or TONGUES, which was developed by Carnegie Mellon University for Lockheed Martin. As part of a DARPA program known as the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use, SRI International has further developed two-way translation software for use in Iraq called IraqComm in 2006 which contains a vocabulary of 40,000 English words and 50,000 words in Iraqi Arabic. == Notable users == The handheld translator was recently used by U.S. troops while providing relief to tsunami victims in early 2005. About 500 prototypes of the device were provided to U.S. military forces in Operation Enduring Freedom. Units loaded with Haitian dialects have been provided to U.S. troops in Haiti. Army military police have used it in Kandahar to communicate with POWs. In late 2004, the U.S. Navy began to augment some ships with a version of the device attached to large speakers in order to broadcast clear voice instructions up to 400 yards (370 m) away. Corrections officers and law enforcement in Oneida County, New York, have tested the device. Hospital emergency rooms and health departments have also evaluated it. Several Native American tribes such as the Choctaw Nation, the Ponca, and the Comanche Nation have also used the device to preserve their dying languages. Various law enforcement agencies, such as the Los Angeles Police Department, also use the phraselator in their patrol cars. == Awards == In March 2004, DARPA director Dr. Tony Tether presented the Small Business Innovative Research Award to the VoxTec division of Marine Acoustics at DARPATech 2004 in Anaheim, CA. The device was recently listed as one of "Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" in MIT's Technology Review. == Pop culture == Software developer Jack Buchanan believes that building a device similar to the fictional universal translator seen in Star Trek would be harder than building the Enterprise. The device was mentioned in a list of "Top 10 Star Trek Tech" on Space.com.

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