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Start-up of the month: "We're building a brain!"
The rise of the new LAD...

By Ben King

Published: Thursday 21 March 2002

silicon.com is a little sick of writing endless stories about redundancies and bankruptcies. In the first of a new series, we profile the people who chose the dot-com downturn as the perfect time to set up a new company...

Imagine a Microsoft paperclip that is actually useful. Or a telephone menu system that isn't infuriating. Imagine a computer boxing game where you can insult your opponent before the fight and he insults you back.

Well, perhaps not the last one. Luckily there are still some things computers can't do. But a small London-based start-up called Lobal Technologies is working on a system to simulate the way humans use language more closely than ever before.

Lobal is working on an artificial intelligence system so intelligent its staff hate it being called 'artificial intelligence'. In a tiny office on a quiet mews development near Baker Street tube station in London the six staff of Lobal spend their working days raising a virtual baby.

The baby is called LAD - which stands for Language Acquisition Device. It's basically a computer than can talk like a human. LAD was only talking in text when I went to see him as the voice interface was temporarily out of action - not unlike a real teenager, in fact.

It wasn't a very interesting conversation either. Lobal's current demo for LAD involves giving simple instructions to a little tank that understands about 20 words - nothing you couldn't program a ZX Spectrum to do.

The point about LAD is that it actually understands what you say and formulates its own response, based on a model of the world in its own head. It understands sentences word by word and builds its replies word-by-word, rather than just reading a script. If stimulated in the right way, it makes unprompted comments. Which, according to Lobal at least, no other system can do.

The system is based on a model of the human brain, with emulators for the five brain areas that are most important for language processing, built using neural network technology - a computer simulation of the way information is processed in a network of nerve cells.

Fittingly, then, Lobal's roadmap for developing LAD is based on the development of a human child. He's about 18 months old now and just struggling to form sentences. But he's growing up fast. The company hopes to give LAD the linguistic skills of a six-year-old child with a 1,000 word vocabulary by this time next year.

The company has a staff of six, led by Professor John G Taylor, who goes by the title chief scientist. He's every inch the visionary academic, full of stories of experiments on edible crabs (big advantage over computers - you can eat the specimens) and once bought a used car from Vladimir Nabokov. He's also the professor emeritus of mathematics at King's College London and one of the world's leading experts in neural network design.

Chief operating officer Brady Anderson is the business brains behind the fledgling company. He has been to start-up land before, in Silicon Valley back in 1996 before things really started to get out of hand.

His first start-up is still going - a good omen, surely - but he left it to join systems integrator EDS. He met Taylor while doing an MBA at London Business School, signed up soon afterwards and later won an award for the business plan he cooked up for Lobal.

It was one of the company's many business plans and it will doubtless be followed up with many more. Currently, its next move is to sign a deal with a games developer, to work on building the technology into a computer game.

Computer developers are getting to the point where graphics can't get much better but the computer controlled opponents in games are still pretty stupid. Soon, they hope, computer gamers will be able to negotiate peace with a LAD-powered Genghis Khan or shout instructions from the dug-out to a team of 11 LADs on a football pitches.

That's the idea anyway but for the moment LAD is still only 18 months old. When he is the equivalent of six, playing games with him will be more fun - 1,000 words is more than enough for a lifelike David Beckham emulator. By the time he gets to 12 or 13, he'll probably be unbeatable by anyone but a human 12-year-old.

If things go well in the games industry, they'll look to get their technology into a range of other markets - A call centre, for example, where you just tell the computer what you want and it does what you say. Or a car, which responds to your voice commands. Simple concepts both but extremely hard to achieve.

Until then, though, there are several bridges to cross. Negotiating that deal with a games developer will be the hardest step. The demand is definitely there but they'll have to do a lot more work to build a demo model that will get those games studios to open their chequebooks.

Once that first game is out and selling well, the company will have revenues and a proven product. Then Anderson and Taylor will be able to raise a decent slice of cash from the venture capitalists without giving away too big a stake in the company they've created. Or they can sell up to a company like Microsoft for a decent sum.

It's difficult to guess what Lobal's chances really are. There's definitely a demand for what it's making, and Anderson, Taylor and the rest seem to have the vision and desire to carry it out. But will LAD grow up fast enough? Will the games industry play ball? And how will it sell in a fickle marketplace?

Who knows. But, if it is going to happen anywhere, this is the place, says Anderson. "With the UK games industry, you've finally got an industry that's top of the world. This is a fantastic place to be in."

Do you run or know about a start-up whose story we should be telling? If so, drop us an email at editorial@silicon.com