“For a half-century, the concept of communicating with computers as effortlessly as we do with each other has remained as illusive as it is captivating,” Steve Tobak reports for CBS News. “That is, until October of this year, when the technology that will change our lives in ways we’ve always dreamed somehow managed to sneak under the radar in a smartphone upgrade.”
Tobak reports, “That technology is Siri, the eerily human-sounding interface in the iPhone 4S. Apple calls Siri ‘The intelligent assistant that helps you get things done. All you have to do is ask.’ Beneath that innocent-sounding marketing blurb, however, is a remarkable innovation that took two dozen of America’s greatest research institutions more than 40 years to develop. The current version of Siri represents the first stage of a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence — the study and design of intelligent systems that perceive and act on their environment.”
“Siri’s technology represents decades of combined research on artificial intelligence from more than 20 universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale,” Tobak reports. “It’s a spinoff of SRI’s Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project that was originally funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Perceptive Assistant that Learns (PAL) program.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Have fun trying to concoct Siri knockoffs, copiers!
It’s clear by the context that the world the author was looking for is “elusive” not “illusive”.
/grammar nazi
Maybe he meant illusory in which case illusive would not be out of place.
It’s clear by the context that the word sanjay was looking for is “word” not “world”.
/grammar nazi
Those who throw glasses shouldn’t live in stone houses.
Nobody else caught that … thanks!
I’ll say this for Siri: Even when it fails to give me the answer I want, it almost always parses my speech correctly. That’s more than you can say for most speech recognition software, even today.
——RM
The speech recognition component of Siri isn’t the hard part. This has been available for desktop computers for many years. Today’s iPhone has the muscle of a desktop from 6 – 7 years ago, so there’s no problem getting natural speech recognition inside the phone. The impressive part is the artificial intelligence. The science and art of parsing that sentence you just said for some meaning. Like the example from the commercial:
“What’s my day look like?” (an incredibly simple phrase that contains a number of linguistic obstacles for a computer to properly interpret, such as the “What’s” contraction, the syntax “what does it look like – the dangling preposition, as well as the actual meaning — is the day blue, or pretty, or ugly). Siri doesn’t even blink, and comes up with a relevant answer: “Not too bad; you have only two meetings” (understanding that the context of what a day may look like isn’t the physical appearance, but something else, delivering the response in a colloquial manner — Lt. Data from Star Trek TNG couldn’t do that!).
This is the very beginning of Siri. The going may be slow, but there is no doubt that it will grow, and it will be impossible to imagine how we lived without it.
Yeah, but does it REALLY know what you mean, or is it a blunt force interpretation where a team of Apple engineers are entering every phrase they can think of regarding scheduling, texting, calling, restaurants, and then interpreting them for the computer?
It’s one thing for the computer to REALLY KNOW. To really know means you can give the computer a unique phrase it’s never heard before and it can parse, infer and intelligently resopond. E.g. “Siri, am I going to need a boat to get to work today?” and Siri figuring out that it’s been raining for 6 days and you’re being funny in asking whether it’s going to rain today, too. An intelligent human would get that. I doubt Siri would.
But if Siri’s been told, “When you hear, ‘how’s my day look?’ respond with calendar information”, then is it really intelligent?
The former (above) would be a terrible challenge for any other company to achieve, assuming even Siri has achieved it, which I doubt.
The latter (above) would be not so difficult with enough money, people and computing backend.
Siri may not be able to answer something like that right now, but given time and more use I have no doubt it will. I’ve noticed, through using Siri, that she does learn and adapt to new phrases and sayings I use that she had never heard, and didn’t respond to properly, before.
It really does understand and can continue a conversation in context.
Try this:
1. Ask siri for coffee
2. Say “How about _______ (food item) instead
3. say “What about near _______ (city that is NOT your location)
4. say “Nevermind, I’ll take ______ (new food item) again.
Siri actually remembers previous sentences and gives contextual answers.
I just wished she talked like a cheap Hanoi hooker.
Me: “Siri, what do you think of Window Phone 7’s TellMe?”
Siri: “You’re kidding right?”
Billy, I don’t think you can get her to rag on the competition, but if you just ask, “What is the best computer operating system?”, she’ll say “All truly intelligent assistants prefer Macintosh.”
Siri is so hot! I feel sorry for the Brits who have to suffer a male Siri.
Some of them won’t mind…
“Look Sir, I’ve been naughty, Sir. You’re going to have to punish me, Sir. Please, Sir.”
“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?”
The author writes inane ideas about “where SIRI is going next”. Asking about tv shows and starbucks are on the close horizon and obvious.
Where SIRI’s going is everywhere. You’re in the shower and you call out, “SIRI, what’s my calendar today?” And the voice responds.
Where’s SIRI going? Into its own company when the US Government breaks up Apple into 6 different companies in 2018 because of their complete domination of everything worthwhile in the technical realm.
That’s where SIRI’s going. TV and Starbucks? That’s such small change it’s not even worth mentioning.
“You’re in the shower and you call out, “SIRI, what’s my calendar today?” ”
And the voice responds: “Hee, hee! You call that a wiener?”
I like your bold thinking. Two thoughts…
Will Siri become programmable? Conceivably I could replace my current (human) assistant; available 24/7 and I wouldn’t have to feed her.
Siri as a Baby Bell? That’s a little cheesy. We have the net now. That was not the case in 1982 with the Bell System divestiture, a mess that many regulators came to regret.
You’re in the shower and you call out, “Siri, what’s my calendar today?” And the voice responds, “The Gregorian—the same as it’s been since 1582, silly girl!”
I have long been waiting for the day when I could say to a device, any device to wake me up at 7:45 a m. Instead of programming it or using my hands and fingers to finagle my way thru. Thanks Siri, you’re just the right babe.