Huey: Intelligent Agents for Natural Human to Machine Communication

This thesis presents a novel architecture including two new programming languages, allowing software developers to create intelligent agents operating anywhere on the internet, independent of vendors' proprietary ecosystems or hardware. The open source architecture and accompanying languages, Huey and Jak, will allow developers to create vendor-independent, artificial intelligence solutions in the digital assistant space. Huey is a new programming language for building applications to allow the user to speak to or chat with a digital assistant using natural language. Huey uses a grammar-based approach to provide a natural language processing framework for turning user requests into actions. Jak provides an internal, intermediate code representation of actions and data. Jak will help add logic to secure conversations and protect people from inadvertently leaking emotion or private information to other parties. Developers can design and create their own voice and chatbot applications with custom grammars to carry out actions on mobile devices, in web pages, embedded devices, or on remote servers independent of any particular operating system, cloud environment, or proprietary hardware.