Aug 27 2008
myMiaMia
MiaMia is a free answering service for all your questions. You can either call to it, send a text message or get your answer via email. Their baseline ‘Ask anything’ was screaming for a little test.
First question: “Where can I download the latest version of Ubuntu?”
I thought this was an easy one. Two minutes later the following answer was in my inbox:
You can download the Ubuntu 8.04 beta at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/beta. MIAMIA Thanks you for your question.
Sweet.
Now I tried something a little bit harder: “What is the chance Obama will win the American elections?”
The answer:
In a new Gallup survey, Obama leads McCain by eleven percentage points-52 percent to McCain’s 41 percent-on the question of who Americans believe will win the White House this November. Seventy-six percent of Democrats believe Obama will win while 67 percent of Republicans believe McCain will keep the presidency in their party.
Wow.
First question that popped into my head was: are you human?
The FAQ helped me out with that one: MiaMia® is a hybrid system: part of the Natural Language Processing and data base and information search is handled by machines and software, and part by Humans Transcription Agents and by Human Knowledge Agents. As we grow in size and number of handled questions every day, the “memory” of MiaMia® grows as well, and percentage-wise the number of questions totally handled and answered by machines versus by humans grows as well.
Now I’m also testing the SMS feature and it seems to work fine. Although, I recieved a text message telling me the system was overloaded. 10 minutes later I recieved this answer to the following question: ‘At what time I can take a train from Antwerp Central Station to Mechelen today?’
The answer:
I hope I never have to ask something like ‘What’s the number for 911 in Belgium’, because it will probably be too late ;).
(BTW, the answer to that question is ‘100 or 112′. Smart software, I say!)
MiaMia seems to be a product of Jo Lernout, better known as one half of Lernout and Hauspie Speech Products.
Try it yourself on www.mymiamia.com
Via a tweet from Clopin
Last 5 posts by Lev Detrez
- Wish you were beer! - December 30th, 2008
- Best Wishes from MTV - December 29th, 2008
- City Visions in Mechelen - December 18th, 2008
- Updating the Ranch II - December 16th, 2008
- Direct a Radiohead gig - December 11th, 2008
Suuuuper!
[Reply]
Allright! Just found an unfoundable contact adress for an unfoundable underground party-adres: yeehaa for mia mia, “dunno how them little mia’s do it: but they sure can do a little worlwidesearch” I say!
[Reply]