Dr. Jim's Design Corner

Dr. Jim has a brilliant concept that may well result in breakthroughs in strong AI.

But his approach appears to mired down in tasks that any well qualified EE could perform:

- Developing an operating system.
- Developing voice recognition software
- Developing expanded memory

From viewing his videos, Dr. Jim is no kid. I would strongly recommend that Dr. Jim protect the time he has left and leave the comfortable nuts and bolts to others and focus on the learning concepts.

I hope my strongly worded recommendation is taken in a meaningful way. That is my intent.

I patientally await AI reasults.

My experience comes from 40 years of managing engineers who sometimes forget to put the pencil down.

Larry Cardo
Mentor, OH

MIT Response:

Larry,

We appreciate your thoughtful comments and agree that Dr. Gouge needs to be less involved in mundane tasks and concentrate on the core AI. We are starting to put together a group of people that will be able to do this.

Thank you for your interest and your comments.

Sincerely,

Mark and Patti Allred
Machine Intelligence Technologies
support@machineinteltech.com

Dr. Jim continues to work on the Voice Recognition software. He is getting closer to completion. He has been out of town for a few weeks, but once he returns, Voice Recognition should be released soon after. Keep an eye on the blog for release information.

Mark Allred

Dr. Jim's Corner has been receiving a lot of spam lately, in the form of visitors comments. I understand these spam-filled comments are reaching your emails as well.

In an effort to curtail the spam on our blog, we have turned off user comments. I tried to do it at the user level, but it appears that this blog software will only allow me to turn all comments either on or off. For the mean time, they are turned off.

We apologize for this inconvenience. If you have something you want to comment on, please send us an email to support@machineinteltech.com. We will be happy to create a weekly feedback post. I believe this is the best solution for now.

We will ignore any spam.

Thanks for your understanding.

Mark Allred
Machine Intelligence Technologies
support@machineinteltech.com

Dr. Jim will be releasing a free version of his Voice Recognition software in the fourth quarter of 2009. It should run on any Parallax Propeller system.

Users will need to build the microphone amplifier and the Carrier Wave Removal hardware for this to work. Schematics will be provided.

Since memory on the Propeller is quite confined (32K RAM), this will be a limited, experimental version. There should be enough memory for about 10 spoken words.

Speaker independence is what we are striving for, so anyone should be able to speak to it and the Propeller respond on-screen.

It will be severely limited not only in terms of RAM and therefore number of words, but also, users will not be able to save new words.

It will be a binary release only.

There will be a page or two of instructions included to assist users. This will be bundled with the binary and the schematics and zipped. You will be downloading a single zipped file.

The free version of Dr. Jim's Voice Recognition software should allow users to observe that the technology works before purchasing the system (hardware and software combined).

The full version will require a modified Propeller Proto USB board, at least one 2MB memory expansion board (two would be better), a datalogger, and will be able to support multi-terrabyte hard drives for permanent storage.

This amount of storage should be enough to allow for most and possibly all the words in all the spoken languages on earth to be stored. The system should be able to learn and respond to multiple languages.

There is no time limit to the offer of the free version. Anyone may download and use this for as long as they like.

We will post again when we have the download link live.

Thanks for your interest.

Mark Allred
Machine Intelligence Technologies
support@machineinteltech.com

Dr. Jim is now soliciting programming talent for help with parts of his project to bring machine intelligence to the Parallax Propeller.

This will be an unpaid position, but Dr. Gouge will see that your name and contribution to the project is published.

To apply, send an email to Dr. Jim at support@machineinteltech.com.

Thanks,

Mark Allred
Machine Intelligence Technologies