Smart Personal Assistant

The greatest accomplishment of the Smart Personal Assistant is the fusion of technology from the areas of Semantic Web and Web 2.0, combined with a seamless Integration of the World Wide Web (WWW), resulting in the convergence of Intranet and Internet data and services. The SPA is capable of recognizing the semantic content of external data such as telephone numbers, addresses or hyperlinks at runtime, and thus supports combining this data with all internal services and data. Users accessing the SPA experience a highly simplified service interaction which allows them to use the provided services in various ways by dynamically integrating separate services and data.

As an exemplary scenario, consider a user dragging a visually enhanced telephone num­ber from a Web page onto the SPA Com­munication Center. Based on the user's current context, the optimal communication channel (PSTN, GSM, and VoIP) is deter­mined and the res­pective connection is established. By reali­zing these concepts the SPA facilitates a novel convergent Web-based service usage which allows the combination of “everything with everything”. Thus, the user may aggregate different services and data at runtime in an intuitive way.

In addition to providing various personalized services offering functionality e.g. for planning recreational activities, the Smart Personal Assistant allows the user to combine the provided services at run-time in an intuitive manner. As an example, the current weather forecast may be interconnected with a list of restaurants in order to restrict these results to restaurants providing suitable facilities, such as outdoor areas in case of fair weather.

In addition to supporting the convergence of Intranet and Internet, the SPA as a generic framework may also be adapted easily to various domains such as home, office, hotel or education. Further­more, the SPA provides an intelligent session management mechanism which allows the user,    to interrupt the service interaction the interrupted interaction at a later point in time, even on a different device or in a different communication network (Seamless Mobility). Finally, the SPA features multi-modal user interfaces allowing the user to split up the service usage into separate communication channels, such as voice interaction and interaction via graphical user interfaces, and subsequently access the services simultane­ously on separate devices, such as a mobile device and an HD-enabled television.