J.A.R.V.I.S.

J.A.R.V.I.S. is personal assistant software that can execute intuitive commands and provide feedback in the console window. Due to its name and purpose, we can only assume it was inspired by the natural language UI of "Iron Man".

If you would like to fool around with a personal assistant in digital form, this tool is designed to listen to your needs and execute each command without hesitation. For example, it can tell you the weather by just typing the “weather” command as well as latest news by typing "news".

The interface is quite simple since you can type the commands and read the assistant’s feedback in the main window. Voice is disabled by default but if you enable it with the "voice" command, J.A.R.V.I.S. will remember this setting the next time it's launched.

You can use this program to dim your screen, set an alarm, adjust the volume, view and terminate running processes, increase, decrease, mute and unmute volume, find out the current time and date, or shut down the computer, among other commands.

Although it looks like a fun application, these are several things that can make you reconsider the first impression. For instance, the voice files included in the package are not licensed so you can only use the default Windows voice.

All commands can be displayed on the console with “help”. However, you might stumble across some that are not available for your system such as “msnbrowse” which is supposed to launch the Windows Live Messenger.

Although the list does not give details about the purpose of each command, it's more fun to discover them. Too bad that the software project hasn't received updates for a long time since it still remains in the attention of many computer users today.