Mozilla's Ubiquity goes International

Ubiquity checks the weather Mozilla Labs have released a preview of the next version of Ubiquity, the natural language command line for the Firefox browser. Ubiquity's 0.5 preview is billed as "The First International Ubiquity", in part because the natural language parser has now been rewritten to remove it's assumptions about English. This new parser also allows Ubiquity's commands to be localised, and the preview comes with Danish, English and Japanese localisations.

Previous Ubiquity users will find that the existing commands have been de-hyphenated. For example, a command such as "amazon-search" has now become "search amazon". If Ubiquity comes across a word it doesn't recognise, it makes some network calls to try and establish what your input means and then offers appropriate options. The Labs developers use the word "pasta" as an example; Ubiquity recognises the word as possibly linked to searching for a restaurant and offers that, along with some other options, to the user.

Other changes include a new interactive tutorial to make it easier to get to grips with the Ubiquity interface. Ubiquity 0.5 preview release is available to download for Firefox 3.0 and 3.5, now with release notes. Ubiquity is licensed under the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL).

(djwm)