Voice Assistant to Help Complete Military Missions
This post is also available in: 
עברית (Hebrew)
“In the not too distant future, you can envision military personnel having a number of sensors on them at any given time – a microphone, a head-mounted camera – and displays like augmented reality headsets,” claims Dr. Bruce Draper, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) program manager. “These sensor platforms generate tons of data around what the user is seeing and hearing, while AR headsets provide feedback mechanisms to display and share information or instructions. What we need in the middle is an assistant that can recognize what you are doing as you start a task, has the prerequisite know-how to accomplish that task, can provide step-by-step guidance, and can alert you to any mistakes you’re making.”
The U.S. military has been planning to develop a virtual assistant to help complete tasks more efficiently and with fewer errors with the new Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance (PTG) program.
DARPA wants the virtual assistant to help people in the military better handle the ever-more complex tasks they have to complete using increasingly sophisticated equipment capable of collecting an overwhelming amount of data.
The program is designed to fill the gap in the current crop of virtual assistants that aren’t able to bring the support and coordination of information necessary.
The goal is an AI that can help users go about their job with visual and audio guides, conversing with them to answer questions and alert them to any potential mistakes. DARPA suggested the AI might be put to use to help repair machines, perform emergency medicine, and be a navigator during travel.
The virtual assistant would adapt to the person using it and the circumstances around them, integrating what they are doing physically and measuring their emotional state and how much attention they are paying to craft its approach.
The PTG is the latest of the U.S. military’s publicly announced efforts to develop AI assistants. The Navy recently started looking for ideas for a virtual assistant that could help run sonar scans for submarines, while the Army is working on the Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface, JUDI, that will relay voice commands from soldiers to robotic vehicles. Globally, the Russian military is working on something similar, testing a voice assistant in Marker combat drones, autonomous tanks. Russia has plans for AI in the sky too, adding a voice assistant named Rita to the new MiG-35 fighter jets. Rita is supposedly capable of offering ideas to pilots during combat, according to voicebot.ai.
