Intelligent contextually aware digital assistants

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing instructions that when executed by a computer cause the computer to perform a method for providing context-based web services for a user, the method comprising:

• receiving a sentence as input from a user interacting with a visual interface that includes an animated agent;
• performing natural language processing on the sentence to determine one or more parameters;
• retrieving data from a foreground knowledge graph that contains contextual data for the user and from a background knowledge graph that contains background information corresponding to the one or more parameters, wherein the background knowledge graph is different from the foreground knowledge graph;
• determining a set of arguments based on the one or more parameters, data from the foreground and background knowledge graphs;
• passing the set of arguments to an action module selected based on results of the natural language processing and the set of arguments;
• using the set of arguments, by the selected action module, to interact with web services to perform an action for the user and provide a response to the user,
• wherein providing the response involves using a text-speech translator to produce audio for the response, using a viseme extractor to determine mouth positions of the animated agent for synchronous display with the audio, and animating the animated agent based on animation tags inserted into the response;
• and
• converting general and domain-specific knowledge into modifications to the background knowledge graph, which involves obtaining a document set on a particular subject based on performing a web search, and modifying the background knowledge graph using results from analyzing the document set using a content analysis module and a semantic meaning extraction system.

A computing system for providing context-based web services for a user, the system comprising:

• one or more processors,
• a non-transitory computer-readable medium coupled to the one or more processors having instructions stored thereon that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform a method, the method comprising:
• receiving a sentence as input from a user interacting with a visual interface that includes an animated agent;
• performing natural language processing on the sentence to determine one or more parameters;
• retrieving data from a foreground knowledge graph that contains contextual data for the user and from a background knowledge graph that contains background information corresponding to the one or more parameters, wherein the background knowledge graph is different from the foreground knowledge graph;
• determining a set of arguments based on the one or more parameters and data from the foreground and background knowledge graphs;
• passing the set of arguments to an action module selected based on results of the natural language processing and the set of arguments;
• using the set of arguments, by the selected action module, to interact with web services to perform an action for the user and provide a response to the user,
• wherein providing the response involves using a text-speech translator to produce audio for the response, using a viseme extractor to determine mouth positions of the animated agent for synchronous display with the audio, and animating the animated agent based on animation tags inserted into the response;
• and
• converting general and domain-specific knowledge into modifications to the background knowledge graph, which involves obtaining a document set on a particular subject based on performing a web search, and modifying the background knowledge graph using results from analyzing the document set using a content analysis module and a semantic meaning extraction system.