Editing Total Information Awareness (section)

====Communicator====
[[File:Total Information Awareness -- Communicator diagram.gif|thumb|right|300px|Diagram describing capabilities of the "communicator" project]]

Communicator was to develop "dialogue interaction" technology to enable warfighters to talk to computers, such that information would be accessible on the battlefield or in command centers without a keyboard-based interface. Communicator was to be wireless, mobile, and to function in a networked environment.<ref name="iaosite-communicator">{{cite web|url=http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/Communicator.htm|title=Communicator|work=Information Awareness Office (official website)|access-date=2009-03-15|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090215094648/http://infowar.net/tia/www.darpa.mil/iao/Communicator.htm|archive-date=2009-02-15}}</ref>

The dialogue interaction software was to interpret dialogue's context to improve performance, and to automatically adapt to new topics so conversation could be natural and efficient. Communicator emphasized task knowledge to compensate for natural language effects and noisy environments. Unlike automated translation of [[natural language processing|natural language]] speech, which is much more complex due to an essentially unlimited vocabulary and grammar, Communicator takes on task-specific issues so that there are constrained vocabularies (the system only needs to be able to understand language related to war). Research was also started on foreign-language computer interaction for use in coalition operations.<ref name="iaosite-communicator"/>

Live exercises were conducted involving small unit logistics operations with the [[United States Marines]] to test the technology in extreme environments.<ref name="iaosite-communicator"/>