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Introduction
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Siri is artificial intelligence (AI), not simply voice recognition
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There is a huge difference
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Interprets what is said, uses history to learn from it, uses context to derive meaning
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I also suspect that Apple is using the aggregate knowledge from Siri input to their servers to help make Siri smarter. She can learn.
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Siri has powerful ancestry
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SRI International, founded as Stanford Research Institute
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One of the world's largest contract research institutes.
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Established by the trustees of Stanford University in 1946 and made private in the '70s
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Siri has its roots in the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project which was funded out of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency )
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CALO was inspired by Radar O'Reilly in MASH. An assistant who always knew what the captain wanted sometimes before he did.
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Project involved over 300 of the top minds in fields relating to A.I.
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Adam Cheyer was head of the project and is now director of engineering for Apple’s iPhone group.
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CALO was supposed to allow a machine to have dialog and natural-language understanding, vision, speech, machine learning, planning, reasoning, service delegation and integrate them all into a… human-like assistant that can help you get things done
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The Siri project was designed to take the AI technology from CALO and turn it into a consumer product.
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For the speech part Apple also licenses Nuance which is also based on technology spun out from SRI
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SRI began development of Siri in 2007 and spun out the project in 2008.
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They released an App for iOS
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Apple acquired Siri in 2010
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Why Siri is different
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It has voice recognition and more
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There are four elements to a machine that can function like a person
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1) speech
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2) Decision making algorithms
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3) Data - Siri gets this from the integrated apps and the web (Wikipedia, wolfram alpha, Yelp, etc)
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4) Agency, the ability to execute tasks on your behalf.
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Most existing voice systems rely on specific commands. Key word triggers that need to know what you want to do.
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Siri is designed to not require those (although in current form is does to a certain degree)
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It applies "reasoning" to try and figure out what you mean.
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That reasoning is the application of those 4 elements of machine AI
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Also can rely on past responses and context to derive the meaning of your requests.
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Why is Siri such a big deal
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It's the first wide spread consumer application of this type of technology
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Millions of people now have Siri. It's giving the first AI technology to a mainstream audience, asking them to use it, and they are.
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It's arguably comparable to what Apple did in the 80s by taking computer technology and making it mainstream.
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It represents a big shift it he ways we can interact with computers
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Like the move from text commands to the mouse and GUI
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Now we can move from mouse to natural speech
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Remember this is still BETA, but it's pretty incredible beta.
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Apple now owns this technology and the years of research that went into it
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The Siri team is reportedly one of the largest teams at Apple
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They also have the talent and have hired on more in the past few years
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No doubt Google and Microsoft will try and catch up
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Google's Android VP Andy Rubin said at the All Things Digital conference, "I don't believe that your phone should be an assistant. Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone."
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Google is concerned enough about Siri's potential that is has shifted a key speech recognition engineer, Dave Burke, from the U.K. to join the Android team at Google's Mountain View. Calif. headquarters,
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Apple has a significant lead
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Use response and adoption may go slower than Apple wants
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Speaking to a device in public can be a very public and often socially awkward way to interact.
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iPhone 4S does have Bluetooth 4.0 which allows low power short range operation.
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Talks of things like watches that could act as mic for Siri input
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It's only the beginning
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As TidBits points out, disruptive innovation doesn't happen overnight, but often seems that way in retrospect
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Siri is the seed of disruptive change.
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A paradigm shift to a Star Trek future where voice and speech may be the primary interface to data
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It's not going to happen overnight. Just like the mouse wasn't understood by many when it was first introduced.
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