Dunietz's ambition is to develop a computer that functions as an assistant, doing all sorts of time-consuming chores. Going to Japan for a holiday? The computer will book your ticket, choose your seat on the plane, organize a hotel and arrange for a rental car to await you at the airport.
"We can have a personal assistant, a slave, a friend who doesn't really suffer by being delegated these tasks," Dunietz said.
You will not need a mouse or keyboard to operate the computer as it will function when you converse with it.
"It is going to be the next user interface, the last user interface," Dunietz said, explaining that it will replace the mouse, computer pointing devices and the Microsoft Windows environment.
"Machines will be extremely human-like in many respects and particularly the most important respect which is the ability to communicate like humans," Dunietz said.
For years intelligent computers have featured in Hollywood productions such as Star Trek and most recently in Steven Spielberg's AI Artificial Intelligence, a film about a robot boy called David who dreams of being human.
But intelligent machines have remained the domain of science fiction books and movies even though AI's chief scientist Jason Hutchens believes the computer technology of today is powerful enough to produce artificially intelligent computers.
"It's just that we don't know the secret yet," said Hutchens, an Australian who won the prestigious Loebner artificial intelligence prize in 1996. "Our goal is the holy grail of artificial intelligence, it's to get a computer program that can use language," he said. The idea is to educate Hal gradually, the way a child learns, through trial-and-error and rewards when he performs well.
Hutchens believes that it will take about a decade to develop Hal's language and communications skills from that of a toddler to an adult.
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