Sirius: An open-source digital assistant
An open-source computing system you command with your voice like Apple’s Siri is designed to spark a new generation of “intelligent personal assistants” for wearables and other devices. It could also lead to much-needed advancements in the datacenter infrastructure to support them.
Sirius, built by University of Michigan engineering researchers, is similar to Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Google Now – robust applications that accept voice instructions and questions, interpret them, and answer in spoken words. Sirius even uses many of the algorithms. But unlike its expensive and locked-down commercial counterparts, Sirius is free and can be customized. “Now the core technology is out of the bag, and we all have access to it,” said Jason Mars, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering. “Instead of making an app to run on the Apple Watch, for example, maybe I could make my own watch. We’re very excited to see what the world comes together to build and learn with Sirius as a starting point.”
Mars sees Sirius as an important platform for research into the development of next-generation warehouse computing. It gives researchers a testbed for studying how the datacenters that process voice-enabled queries should evolve to keep up with escalating pressure from wearable gadgets. Voice-enabled queries, the researchers found, can be more than 100 times more computationally intensive than a simple text web search. They calculated that if voice were to supplant text for web queries, datacenter infrastructure would need to grow by 165 times.
ABOUT THE PROFESSOR
Jason Mars is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests are cross-layer systems architectures for emerging applications, datacenter and warehouse-scale computer architecture, and hardware / software co-design.
