Narval is the first software agent available as free software.
Narval is the acronym of "Network Assistant Reasoning with a Validating Agent Language".
Narval is a framework (language + interpreter + GUI/IDE) dedicated to the setting up of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs).
An Intelligent Personal Assitant is a companion that will help you in your daily work in the information world. It runs on your machine or on a remote server, and you can communicate with it via all standard means (email, web, telnet, phone, specific GUI, etc). It executes recipes (sequences of actions) you wrote, to perform a wide range of tasks, such as prepare your morning newspaper, help you surf the web by filtering out junk ads, keep searching the web day after day for things you want, participe in on-line auctions, learn you interests and bring you back valuable information, take care of repetitive chores, answer e-mail, negociate the date and time of a meeting, and much more... It is easy to extend the built in action library by writing new actions in Python.
The mascot of the Narval Project is called Ornicar and is (of course) a narwhale.
Features
Narval features cutting-edge artificial intelligence and software design techniques. When it was born a few months ago, cyber-fairies predicted it would rapidly spread across the internet and into the world to become the ubiquitous dedicated intelligent personnal assistant we've all been longing for during the dark ages of dumb computing ;-).
Narval is designed to be a companion that will help you in your daily work in the information world. It runs on your machine or on a remote server, and you can communicate via all standard means (email, web, telnet, phone, etc). It executes recipes you wrote, to perform a wide range of tasks, such as prepare your morning newspaper, help you surf the web by filtering out junk ads, keep searching the web day after day for things you want, participe in on-line auctions, learn you interests and bring you back valuable information, take care of repetitive chores, answer e-mail, and much more...
All these features are not available yet, but you can easily specify new action using and implement new plug-ins in Python. At Logilab, we already use a narval called Gizmo as a project coordinator, and each of us has a narval companion!
