Denise 1.0 virtual assistant

I think she will probably blow UltraHal away in terms of being an assistant. There seems to be a lot more features available than there is in Hal - out of the box that is. Also presentation is quite a way ahead of UltraHal.

Presently I am not sure about customisation as only a few details have emerged - but there is provision for developers to use various things to adapt her. I don't know if that would be as 'easy' as customising Hal so it remains to be seen how popular she would be in the computer hobbiest type market which we see a lot of over on Zabaware. UltraHal has some nice new things lately though, like the appearance in Second Life - but users are still waiting for that to filter down.
Watching the videos of Denise proved many points to me in the A.i program, the AI must understand your command and be able
to assess the task given and what action needs to be given to complete the task given, (In part 2 of Guile 3D Studio presentation Guile asks Denise to find out information about Coldplay, after a while he asks her to convert some english to French and so on...)

Of course a lot of people will be interested in what she can do beyond the computer too - meaning things like house automation and such like - with enough developers on board it could flourish.

Also we don't get an idea yet of whether she is very chatty. As Guile has gone for the assistant market (such as it is) then I am not so sure if she would be as good a chatter as some of the more advanced chatbots.

Whatever the case, what struck me is that this would seem great for people who have difficulty using computers as well as the enthusiasts.