Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing the world. during this decade, AI is advancing in a rapid speed. Also, it spreading through every industry to rebuild the their operational structure.
AI can make human lives more easier and comfortable by complex task handling. On of the major potential use cases of AI is to automate home tasks and work as an intelligent virtual assistant in daily basis at home.
The emerge of Home virtual assistants is not a new thing. A decade ago in 2014, Amazon introduced their newest product called “Alexa”. This was smart home assistant service that can automate several tasks such as controlling Bluetooth devices, interact with humans, internet search etc. For decade, Alexa is still the largest home assistant service in the world, with market cap of 70% only in USA.
In this article, we are mainly focusing on how advanced AI-powered virtual assistants can change home automation and ultimately make human lives more comfortable and efficient.
The first major home assistant that was released to the market is called ‘Alexa’. Alexa was developed by Amazon. The first batch was released in 2014. Alexa is a voice command-based AI assistant that can be used for task automation and interaction with humans. Alexa is the world’s most common virtual assistant with over 75% market share only in the USA. Besides Alexa, there are other assistants including Google Home Assistant, Apple Siri, Dragon Fire for Linux and Microsoft Cortana.
But most of these assistants are very outdated compared to modern technologies. Specially the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence has made these devices more outdated.
Look at the following tweets.
These tweets are from a few months ago and they describe how Alexa and other common virtual assistants have lost track of rapid AI developments in recent years. So, it is important to build a state-of-the-art home assistant service/system for modern and futuristic homes.
Building a state-of-art AI-home virtual assistant :
Building a virtual assistant from scratch is not an easy task. For every virtual assistant, there are a few basic and essential features:
Natural Language processing:
Natural language processing or NLP is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence that is used machine learning algorithmic approach to understand the natural human languages (mainly english).
“NLP enables computers and digital devices to recognize, understand and generate text and speech by combining computational linguistics—the rule-based modeling of human language—together with statistical modeling, machine learning and deep learning.” –IBM–
Natural language generation:
This is also a subset of AI that use algorithmic approach to generate natural human language results from structured or unstructured data. It helps computers to feed back to users in human language that they can comprehend, rather than in a way a computer might.
task automation:
Task automation simply the process where we using technology to automatically perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks that would normally be done manually by humans, essentially freeing up people to focus on more complex work by minimizing the need for manual intervention and improving overall productivity. Task automation is not necessarily a AI-based technology. But using AI such as ML algorithms can improve the quality of task automation.
speech recognition:
Speech recognition, also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech-to-text, is a capability that enables a program to process human speech into a written format.
These are the basic AI-powered features that current AI-assistants have in their arsenal.
Trinity: A futuristic AI-assistant:
With recent developments of technology and AI, it is clear that we can build artificial intelligent virtual assistant services that has many advanced features than current virtual assistants in the market.
Project Trinity is futuristic virtual assistant that is being developed by AI-start up Interlink AI. The fist demonstration of AI can be watched through this link.
Trinity is being built as a state-of-art virtual assistant. Beside the basic functionalities we mentioned previously, Trinity is being built with several latest advancements of Artificial intelligence including deep learning and foundation models/LLMs.
Here are some of the latest technologies and features we using in trinity to perform as a state-of-art assistant service.
Hardware:
Trinity is running on a single board computer unit. This unit can be either NVIDIA jetson series or Raspberry Pi-5 with accelerators. The hardware is very important for better performances. The computer will be chosen according to package features. The hardware bundle will be included with a SBC computing unit and touch/non-touch digital screen. The screen is the display unit for the trinity virtual assistant. additionally, the computing unit can be connected to a smart tv via HDMI cable. The computing unit also contains USB ports that can connect external input/output devices such as keyboards.
Operating System:
The operating system is open-source Linux-based OS such as raspberry Pi-OS. Linux is a better option for running ML algorithms and AI developments.
Servers:
current assistants are working on cloud servers such as AWS servers. But Trinity is working on onboard server that is specifically installed for that household. This is a better option for protecting customers privacy. Only they have the general access to the servers. Server is also working as the data storage unit.
Camera units:
Trinity ca be integrated into local camera units such as CCTV cameras into our system and gather live visual input data. you can connect remote cameras such as Go-Pros via Bluetooth for real time monitoring.
Sensors:
We can connect external sensor such as temperature sensors, motion sensors, and light sensors etc. These sensors can be connected and control via Trinity through voice command or touch-based digital screen.
IoT (Internet of Things):
IoT is a major feature in current virtual assistants. Alexa can control devices remotely such as lights, tv, speakers etc. most of these devices must have Bluetooth-based control ability. Trinity is also able to control devices via Bluetooth.
Machine learning:
Machine learning is one of the major applications we are using to build trinity. Machine learning is a major subfield of AI where enabling computers to learn themselves by using algorithmic structures to perform tasks more accurate without any human interventions. With the use of ML, we are automating tasks more easily and generate more accurate results.
Deep Learning:
Deep learning are more advanced ML algorithms that use neural network architecture for better performance. for example natural language processing is a Deep learning process that use deep learning algorithms with NN architectures.
Computer vision:
Computer vision is another major subfield of AI. It is basically the process of giving computers the ability to understand the surrounding by analyzing visual input data through ML algorithms. It is basically equivalent to humans see and recognize through eyes and brain.
Foundation models and Large Language models:
Foundation models and large language models are recent developments of AI.
Foundation models are large-scale Machine Learning models that are trained on vast amount of diverse input data and build versatile for several tasks even without fine-tuning. They basically serve as foundation for various technical tasks. Most common examples for foundation are Open AI’s GPT and Google’s BERT. Foundation models are versatile in various tasks including natural language processing, image and content generation etc.
Large language models are a subfield of Artificial intelligence-based systems that are designed and developed to understand, generate, and analyze human-like texts. These models are built using machine learning techniques, particularly deep learning, and are trained on vast datasets that include text from books, articles, websites, and more.
Between LLMs and Foundation models, foundation models are more suitable for voice command-based virtual assistants due to their ability for multi-modality. Voice assistant require many processes including NLP, NLG and TTS.
Trinity has three major features.
- Home automation
- Home security
- Human-like intelligent intteraction.
Home automation:
Home automation is using current technology to automate and control household tasks such as turning on/off lights, heating, air conditioning, security cameras, door locks, appliances, and entertainment systems. It allows homeowners to remotely manage and monitor their homes using smartphones, voice assistants, or AI-powered systems.
Trinity can automate most of the day-to-day task including:
- controlling devices that are Bluetooth enabled (lights, thermosets, smart-tv, smart-fridge, etc.)
- give a reports on specific subjects such as weather, stocks, crypto
- give daily news updates from selected news platforms
- advanced internet search, you tube search, with voice command
- give information about a topic (e.g.: a person, a place) via internet or LLM such as Open AI chat-GPT via API.
- automate emails, business/work messages based on user inputs
- schedule automated tasks
Home security:
Home security refers to the measures and systems designed to protect a home from intrusions, theft, vandalism, fire, and other threats. It includes both physical security features (like locks and alarms) and smart technology (such as AI-powered surveillance and automated security systems).
Trinity is offering several advanced features in security and surveillance including:
- 24/7 security monitoring
- using advanced ML algorithms to analyze visual input data in real-time
- intruder detection.
- abnormal activity detection
- get alerts to phone or to email based on detections
- pets and children activity monitoring
- live remote monitoring and control
- automatic doors/ gates opening
- facial recognition door bell
- recognize specific individuals based on facial recognition feature
- activate additional security features automatically based on live detections
Sample test on facial recognition-based identification: YouTube
Intelligent human-like interaction:
Intelligent Human-Like Interaction refers to AI systems that communicate and engage with humans in a way that mimics natural human conversation, behavior, and emotional intelligence. These systems use advanced AI technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, computer vision, and machine learning to understand, respond, and adapt to human interactions.
Trinity has advanced interaction functions that can can have a intelligence conversations with humans using It’s own foundation model or external LLM such as Chat-GPT or Grok.
Sample intelligent interaction can be watched on my X account: @vishwaGW
- natural language processing and generation
- speech-to-text and text-to-speech
- reinforcement learning to learn new things from user and store them in server for future conversations
- complex data handling for faster conversations
- intelligent responses by integration with foundation models
- emotional intelligence (detect emotions and switch to suitable interaction mode)
Trinity is an intelligent home virtual assistant that use several subfields of AI for better performances than current virtual assistant.
The full demo of our prototype is available here: YouTube