rhlsthrm Posted January 19, 2017 Share Posted January 19, 2017 Is there a way to make Alfred use more natural language processing for queries so that there doesn't have to be a keyword and the intent can be determined through parsing the query for intent? I think this could be a great feature for Alfred, which could then turn into a voice engine. Having this controlled by the Alfred remote on the phone then becomes quite powerful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vitor Posted January 19, 2017 Share Posted January 19, 2017 No, it is not possible. The vast majority of workflows are user built and you can’t really automatically derive context from them automatically. They’re built in so many different ways and with so many languages, that’s not really feasible. Also, considering the power of what Alfred workflows can do (anything a script can), I’m glad that’s the case. You really don’t want to be bitten by a misinterpretation. Just look at the companies with the most money and the best engineers. They can barely do it acceptably! Siri itself just got her capabilities opened to third party developers, and they have to plug into their API, it’s not like she does it automatically. Natural language processing is something you can add to a specific workflow, but it’s not something you can make Alfred do automatically. Unless of course you’re only referring to Alfred’s default capabilities, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. deanishe and nikivi 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanishe Posted January 19, 2017 Share Posted January 19, 2017 6 hours ago, vitor said: You really don’t want to be bitten by a misinterpretation I hadn't thought about this before, but now you mention it, having something as broken as Siri connected to Alfred or Terminal is a scary scenario. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhlsthrm Posted January 19, 2017 Author Share Posted January 19, 2017 I am thinking more in a "futuristic" sense of a computing world where layman-users can essentially tell the computer what to do and the computer will be able to know what they want to do and do it. This can translate to voice as well, mimicking an Iron Man-like situation (with his "Jarvis" computer). I believe an app like Alfred is a great jumping off point for this type of vision. If there is a way for Alfred to get smarter and smarter and learn about what the user wants to do, this would start to develop the vision. Would love to hear thoughts and discussion about this topic. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhlsthrm Posted January 19, 2017 Author Share Posted January 19, 2017 12 hours ago, deanishe said: I hadn't thought about this before, but now you mention it, having something as broken as Siri connected to Alfred or Terminal is a scary scenario. Sure, as "broken" as it is now, this is the future, and there is no doubt that these technologies will become smarter and better as time goes on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vitor Posted January 19, 2017 Share Posted January 19, 2017 @rhlsthrm Your vision is still far off from reality, and as stated above Alfred is not ideal for this because it is too versatile. Your vision requires what Apple is doing with Siri: limited capabilities that will expand over time. Also, Alfred has a team of two. Apple, Google, and other companies have immense teams working on just this, not to mention the abundance of independent researchers. To get a sense for the current state of the technology, you’re likely to find something on Two Minute Papers. As the technology stands now, there’s no way it would make sense for Alfred to go down this path. If you want to shout commands at your computer for Alfred to execute, you can do it now and have been able to for years. You can add dictation commands to run things on your machine. But to have it correctly interpret what you want in freeform speech, as it stands it is not a feature request, it is a mere concept. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanishe Posted January 19, 2017 Share Posted January 19, 2017 Is there an API for Data Detectors (the feature that highlights dates and phone numbers in Mail.app)? Might be an interesting feature if Alfred pre-processed the query with Data Detectors and exposed any parsed results as workflow variables. For example, if the query contains "noon tomorrow", Alfred might set the variable DATETIME to 2017-01-20T00:53+0100 (or similar). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhlsthrm Posted January 20, 2017 Author Share Posted January 20, 2017 @vitor, completely understand. Alfred is powerful and has the potential to at least demonstrate this functionality. Voice aside, I think it would be great to be able to do some small bit of NLP on the queries. From your first response, it seems like you can add some bit of NLP into the workflows, which might be a good starting point. I'll explore further. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vitor Posted January 20, 2017 Share Posted January 20, 2017 23 minutes ago, rhlsthrm said: From your first response, it seems like you can add some bit of NLP into the workflows, which might be a good starting point. I'll explore further. You can, but you need to do the legwork yourself. Check the Reminders workflow; it handles dates and times well. rhlsthrm 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dfay Posted January 20, 2017 Share Posted January 20, 2017 I got very excited about Alfred remote and dictation when remote first came out. I don't think I've used it in the past year though...but there might be something helpful here: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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