Virtual assistants have become a standard feature on millions of devices (laptops and desktops), but the quest to perfect them is far from over. They still stumble on many tasks, and the amount of personal data they require can be unsettling. That hasn't stopped the development of more open alternatives, which brings us to P-Brain. Its creator presents it as a "clone" of Amazon's Alexa, and it already has the ability to process basic commands, including the time and the weather.
In a recent update to my Kindle Fire, Amazon integrated Alexa—which, by the way, I've disabled. On my main machine, Cortana waits patiently for me to bark a command, but the truth is there isn't even a microphone connected. I'm not against virtual assistants by any means; I actually gave Cortana a fair shot for months on my laptop, but the built-in microphone's quirks made the whole experience frustrating. Maybe I'm just too old school and prefer to find things on my own, but the virtual assistant concept deserves a deep exploration. So far, the market's leading solutions are all proprietary. What would it take to craft a more open and flexible assistant?
Patrick Quinn decided to find out with P-Brain, a DIY clone of Alexa, in his own words. P-Brain is written in Node.js and relies on a compatible package called Natural to match your commands against a set of skills. What kind of skills? For now, it can process the time, current weather conditions (local and elsewhere), and the forecast for the week ahead. It can also look up well-documented events, (such as the day Steve Jobs died), and—most intriguingly—it can query Google with the command "ask Google".
The preliminary version of P-Brain works only on Google Chrome, though Quinn says he'll drop that dependency (here's a video with the first prototype), and his next goal is to prepare a client for Raspberry Pi that installs via a Curl script. P-Brain still has plenty of rough edges to sand down, but its open nature gives it tremendous potential.
