ACT-1, your new AI assistant

Action Transformer (ACT-1). © Adept.

The California-based firm Adept announced the AI model Action Transformer (ACT1), which interacts with software interfaces and performs actions in response to commands written in plain English. In a Twitter demo video, ACT-1 responds to the request “Find me a house in Houston that works for a family of 4 with a budget of 600K”. The tool uses the real-estate website Redfin and changes the interface parameters until a matching result appears on screen. Adept’s website shows ACT-1 operating Salesforce, Google Sheets, Craigslist and Wikipedia, giving a glimpse of the usefulness of this kind of assistant to save us a lot of screen time. Adept states that the model can also accomplish tasks that require the use of several applications. The company says it hopes to make ACT-1 even more useful by having it ask for the clarifications it needs to better understand what we want it to do.

⇨ Ars Technica, Benj Edwards, “New AI assistant can browse, search, and use web apps like a human.”

2022-09-15