Intelligent Conversational Research Assistant

Previous virtual digital assistants (e.g., Siri®, Google Assistant®, Cortana®, Alexa®, etc.) allow users to speak requests to computers or mobile phones, which then perform speech-to-text recognition and execute web searches based on the content of the user's request. However, such systems cannot provide answers that are geospatially and space-time aware, for example, what the weather was like in San Francisco three days ago. In addition, typical virtual assistants only allow community users to indirectly influence system behavior through their queries. MATA provides a conversational assistant and associated computing to turn 40 years and hundreds of terabytes of Earth science of NASA Earth science data into usable knowledge. This system engages with users in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialogue, and invokes external web services, when appropriate, to obtain information and perform various actions on a variety of satellite and geospatial data to provide spatio-temporally aware answers. MATA is conversational computing, not just a conversational assistant. Broadly, this technology takes a query, translates that query into to an intent, then that intent invokes the right capability, which in turn invokes the right APIs for computations that take milliseconds. MATA does not simply retrieve an answer from a database, but it intelligently answers a user's question within its specific context. NASA Ames has developed a community-driven, context-aware intelligent research assistant system (MATA - Sanskrit name for the Earth) which is capable of engaging with users in a conversational manner using natural language dialogue, invoking external community-provided web services to obtain information or to perform actions, and vocalizes the responsive action back to the user. This novel, patented technology is an intelligent, virtual, personalized conversational research assistant system. Specifically designed for geospatial queries of Earth science data, this software application provides conversational computing, not just a conversational assistant. It is able to run on a personal computer or a mobile phone that facilitates user interaction with the system. This technology allows users to add new capabilities and new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) so that it can be applied to a wide variety of applications.