Narval For Linux

A framework (language + interpreter + GUI/IDE) dedicated to the setting up of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs).

this website is currently out-of-date. narval is undergoing heavy development and a new release should be published befor the end of 2004. due to some external constraints, it is not possible to show the code at the moment. we hope you'll stay tuned anyway. subscribe to our announce mailing-list to be informed when it comes out.

Narval is the first software agent available as free software (Gnu Public License).

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.

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!

Requirements:

· a python >= 2.2 interpreter · logilab's common library · twisted

To install Narval, extract the source code from the tarball, go to the narval-X.Y directory and type:

$ python setup.py install

This will install both narval. Do the same thing with the horn package to install it if necessary. You can type:

$ python setup.py install --help

to see available installation options. That maybe usefull if you want to install it without being root for instance. Notice that in this case you'll probably have to set the NARVAL_SHARE environment variable to provide to narval the location of its shared resources.

Once the installation done, you should have the following executable installed:

· narval, the narval interpreter · npm, the narval package manager · narval-runtest, a developpment tool used to run functional tests · horn, the narval graphical user interface (if the separated package has been installed)