Ultra Hal Personal Assistant

The Ultra Hal Assistant is a personal assistant that increases your productivity. It is possible to chat or speak with the artificial intelligence to let it do a number of things for you. This includes starting programs, reading text, reminding you of appointments, looking up local news and weather, defining words, dictating text and more.

I’m quickly describing the installation before I continue to write about the functionality of the assistant. I did download the newest version of Ultra Hal Assistant and the Text to Speech Reader. After the installation I had to customize the program by selecting a character, typing in my name and that of the AI, choosing one of the voices from two female and eight male voices and selecting an interface. I was then asked if I wanted to see the tutorial which I would recommend to anyone who wants to try the software.

The artificial intelligence learns from your conversations. It will ask questions and remember the answers. My first conversation with him started with the question if I was male or female. Conversations will get more complex after time but this seems to take a while. Here is a list of tasks and things that the assistant can do for your:

• Start programs – The Assistant will not open all programs but many default ones from Windows and all that have a shortcut on your desktop.
• Note and remind of appointments – you could for instance say “have to work tomorrow at 9:35 am” and the assistant will get the meaning and remind you of the work. You can set the amount of days and minutes for the reminder.
• Remember emails and start email program – (Martin’s email is martin@mysega.de, to write an email write or say “Email Martin” which will open the default email program.
• Remember phone numbers and call numbers (if supported by modem)
• Information about local weather and local news once set in the options. Only valid for the United States
• Define words for you. Ask “What is Art” and the assistant will define art for your.
• Read text. You do need the add-on called Text to Speech Reader for this option. It can be downloaded for free from the website.
• Perform basic calculations.
• Dictate text. If you activate Speech Recognition in the options you can use your speech to do all of the above plus dictate text to the assistant

One very nice feature of this software is that you can setup the assistant as an AIM Bot. Other people would then be able to chat with the bot while your computer is connected to the network.

The Ultra Hal website offers several free plugins in several categories that add for instance new 3D-models to the program or install speech recognition plugins for commercial speech recognition softwares such as IBM Via Voice.

I would suggest that you download the trial version from the Zabaware website and test the assistant for yourself. It could boost your productivity especially with speech recognition enabled. My most used features are so far “write email” and “start program” but it is somehow very interesting to simply chat with the assistant .

• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Delicious
• Digg
• Twitter

Tags: ai, dictate, personal assistant, speech recognition, ultra hal assistant, zabaware
Categories: Operating Systems, Tools, Windows

Read Related Posts

1. Ultra-Pad a Wordpad replacement
2. Microsoft Research ESL Assistant
3. Music Assistant Helps Tune Your Instruments
4. Remove Microsoft .Net Framework Assistant From Firefox
5. Windows Explorer Alternative Ultra Explorer
6. Phrase Express – Paste frequently used text
7. Disk Defragmenting Software Ultra Defrag
8. Capture image and convert it to text