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Piece of code within FaceUnlock could belong to Majel, the rumored personal assistant for Android devices

Published: Feb 02, 2012, 4:42 AM

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Piece of code within FaceUnlock could belong to Majel, the rumored personal assistant for Android de

Take it as you will, but the program code that you see in the screenshot below could be part of Android's rumored personal assistant, possibly codenamed Majel. The strings were discovered within the FaceUnlock application code found in the Android software development kit, and at a glance, they contain responses that one might expect getting from a Siri-like app or feature.

It is rumored that bringing the aforementioned personal assistant to Android is a task assigned to the Google X team, which we heard of last year. According to people supposedly familiar with the matter, the highly secretive group of people has been working on projects involving artificial intelligence for the past few years. And they have gotten pretty far, sources claim – the said software achieved a 93% success rate during a Turing Test. For those of you who have not heard of it before, the Turing Test measures a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior.

Here is how insiders describe Google's AI software:

...our AI is practically like talking to a human. Siri can give you information, but we can give you conversation. We can also go full genius mode which essentially gives you the sum of internet knowledge via conversation.

It can do objects by using an advanced version of the Google Goggles software. It also has a suite of basically every sensor that could be put on it; optical, laser, infrared, ultrasonic, depth cameras, etc.

It needs an internet connection. Last I heard, it was using an average of only a couple hundred kilobytes per second. Most of the processing is done onboard, internet is used for external information.

Of course, the above information belongs to the realm of rumors for now, so it could all be totally made up. But if it turns out to be real, wouldn't it be cool if one could have a real conversation with their Android smartphone? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

source: Android Authority