Almond: The Architecture of an Open, Crowdsourced, Privacy-Preserving, Programmable Virtual Assistant

This paper presents the architecture of Almond, an open, crowdsourced, privacy-preserving and programmable virtual assistant for online services and the Internet of Things (IoT). Included in Almond is Thingpedia, a crowdsourced public knowledge base of open APIs and their natural language interfaces. Our proposal addresses four challenges in virtual assistant technology: generality, interoperability, privacy, and usability. Generality is addressed by crowdsourcing Thingpedia, while interoperability is provided by ThingTalk, a high-level domain-specific language that connects multiple devices or services via open APIs. For privacy, user credentials and user data are managed by our opensource ThingSystem, which can be run on personal phones or home servers. Finally, we create a natural language interface, whose capability can be extended via training with the help of a menu-driven interface. We have created a fully working prototype, and crowdsourced a set of 187 functions across 45 different kinds of devices. Almond is the first virtual assistant that lets users specify trigger-action tasks in natural language. Despite the lack of real usage data, our experiment suggests that Almond can understand about 40% of the complex tasks when uttered by a user familiar with its capability.