Genie Community Forum

Distributed ThingTalk Protocol

Future of Virtual Assistants
#1

Hi,
I love the slide showing the big picture of distributed assistants communication with “Distributed Thingtalk Protocol” (sources/videos here: https://twitter.com/solyarisoftware/status/1143850503241162752?s=20 )

Can I have some more info about the foreseen technical architecture allowing assistant-to-assistant (Almond-to-Almond) communication for the use case here described?

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Monica Lam in her speeches mentioned several times the “mail” as possible gateway (my interpretation).

Do you foresee user-home “mail servers” as possible host/gateway of personal assistants?
There is any paper/article I could read about the Distributed ThingTalk Protocol?

Thanks
giorgio

#2

Hi Giorgio!

The discussion of the Distributed ThingTalk Protocol is based on the paper Controlling Fine-Grain Sharing in Natural Language With a Virtual Assistant, presented at Ubicomp 2018.

The protocol is based on the Matrix messenger, which associates usernames with real identities like phone numbers and email addresses, but also provides authentication & end-to-end encryption. The core protocol is very simple: with one message you send the request as a ThingTalk program, and with a separate message you optionally return results.

Our main implementation lives in Android Almond. The whole system runs on the phone, which is how we imagine a balance between always-on connectivity and privacy. An alternative design could indeed be to run it on a wifi router or home assistant / smart speaker. And of course, like in the email system, if they wish people can rely on a cloud provider of their choice to host Almond.

1 Like
#3

Super! Thanks Giovanni for crucial info I’ll deepen asap!