I'm focusing my efforts right now on what I can do myself in my spare time without hiring anyone, which is the Hal brain. I'm working on Hal's next generation learning algorithm which I'm quite excited about. Hal will look up conversational answers in its own online conversational database, database learned from the user talking with hal, twitter database, wikipedia, yahoo answers, and general bing search engine, and possibly other sources. User positive/negative feedback (thumbs up/down) as well as users selecting which data source provided the best answer will all feedback to Hal and allow its algorithm to learn which data sources to use in which occassions and allow individual responses to trickle up or down in relevance. I believe that after throwing this system as thousands of users over millions of conversations the "creme will rise to the top" in Hal's knowledge database and Hal will be able to respond more consistently with quality answersa and stay on topic. That's my theory at least, time will tell whether its a good one.
I'm pretty far along my efforts that I believe I'll be able to launch this system before the end of this year. I'll release a version of Ultra Hal Assistant that will offer the user 3 modes: offline brain, offline brain assisted by online brain if available, and online brain only. Each option will have its pros and cons but I'll be defaulting to online only unless the user requests otherwise. I'll also be releasing a phone gap version of Ultra Hal that will work on IOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows RT. These versions will use the online hosted version of Hal's brain.