Brainhat is an NLP executive that can dispatch tasks, handle natural language events, evaluate ideas, and ask and answer questions. Because Brainhat is knowledge representation-based, it can digress within a conversation, answer questions outside the script, and keep rich context.

Brainhat has built-in network capabilities, making it a clearing house and consolidation point for natural language events and delegated tasks.

Applications

Applications for Brainhat are limited scope, prepared sessions, in many ways similar to the statue or restaurant demos you will find elsewhere on this web site. Personal assistants, kiosks, switchboards, and help desk applications are other examples. And Brainhat can be extended to act as a natural computer interface for a robot or other program. A "brain hat" would, to that end, be a wearable computer that talks to you.

Future Directions

People interact by talking, and they mull things over using natural languages, such as English. But it's different when people interact with computers: commands are given through some interface and are broken down into execution primitives. This is true even in most natural language systems; though the user's intention may be harvested using language, the result is low-level computing.

Why should it be this way? For many of the kinds of processing we envision for natural language, the appropriate level of computation is best modelled by the self-talk we engage in when we are thinking through a problem. When searching for an answer, the computer may ask itself questions or ask questions of others, including other instances of the program--all in English. Only when it is time to leave then natural language space, such as when we are directing a robot to move, does it make sense to drop computation to a lower level.

Availability

Brainhat is available in binary form. Somewhat outdated source is available too. There will be no charge for academic, personal or commercial use for all version 1.x code. Please see licensing information for more details.