The world got its first inkling of the quick wit that would make Apples
Siri an icon during a packed press conference held before an auditorium of
tech elite.
Who are you? an Apple executive asked the assistant.
I am a humble personal assistant, Siri answered to appreciative laughter.
More like humbled personal assistant. That press conference was actually
Siris second coming-out party. When the virtual assistant first launched in
early 2010, it was a standalone iPhone app called Siri created by a
24-person startup with the same name, a company Apple would later acquire.
Back then, Siri boasted an even more irreverent tone and a more robust set
of skills. Like fiction writers dreaming up a character, Dag Kittlaus,
Siris co-founder and chief executive, and Harry Saddler, a design expert,
had carefully crafted the assistants attitude and backstory. It was to be
otherworldly, vaguely aware of popular culture and armed with a dry
wit, Kittlaus says.
Ask it about gyms, and Siri sent back a mocking, Yeah, your grip feels
weak. Ask, What happened to HAL? the brainy (and murderous) talking
computer that starred in Stanley Kubricks 1968 thriller 2001: A Space
Odyssey and it delivered a sullen, I dont want to talk about it. In
those days, Siri still had fuck in its lexicon.
That was before Apple washed Siris mouth out with soap and curbed many of
its talents, even as it endowed the assistant with new gifts. The Siri that
Apple introduced in October 2011, 16 months after acquiring the technology
for a reported $150 to $250 million, had expanded its linguistic range from
one to multiple languages. It was scaled to serve millions of people and
programmed to operate internationally. It had acquired a voice with which to
speak its answers, where before it had offered only written responses. And
it was deeply integrated into the iPhone, so that it could tap into about a
dozen of Apples own tools to handle simple tasks like scheduling a meeting,
replying to emails or checking the weather.
As impressive as those talents were, most failed to realize that Apples
version of Siri lacked many of the features once built into the program.
This, after all, was no ordinary iPhone app, but the progeny of the largest
artificial intelligence project in U.S. history: a Defense Department-funded
undertaking that sought to build a virtual assistant that could reason and
learn.
At its original debut, in 2010, Siri had been able to connect with 42
different web services from Yelp and StubHub to Rotten Tomatoes and
Wolfram Alpha then return a single answer that integrated the best details
culled from those diverse sources. It had been able to buy tickets, reserve
a table and summon a taxi, all without a user having to open another app,
register for a separate service or place a call. It was already on the verge
of intuiting a users pet peeves and preferences to the point that it
would have been able to seamlessly match its suggestions to his or her
personality.
At a 2010 tech conference, Siri co-founder Tom Gruber demonstrated the apps
reach: Telling the assistant, Id like a romantic place for Italian food
near my office, yielded an answer that seamlessly combined facts from
Citysearch, Gayot, Yelp, Yahoo! Local, AllMenus.com, Google Maps, BooRah and
OpenTable.
As conceived by its creators, Siri was supposed to be a do engine,
something that would allow people to hold conversations with the Internet.
While a search engine used stilted keywords to create lists of links, a do
engine could carry a conversation, then decide and act. Had one too many
drinks? The ability to coordinate a Google search for a ride home might
elude you, but a do engine could translate a muttered, Im drunk take me
home, into a command to send a car service to your location. The startups
goal was not to build a better search engine, but to pioneer an entirely new
paradigm for accessing the Internet, one that would let artificially
intelligent agents summon the answers people needed, rather than pull
relevant resources for humans to consult on their own. If the search engine
defined the second generation of the web, Siris co-founders were confident
the do engine would define the third.
The do engine was designed to be a participant in the life at hand one
that could anticipate what you wanted before you wanted it, and make it
yours before you could ask. Siris creators planned, though never
implemented, a way for Siri to assist waylaid travelers: The assistant could
preempt the frustration caused by a delayed plane by suggesting alternate
flights, trains departing shortly, or car rental companies with vehicles
available.
This Siri the Siri of the past offers a glimpse at what the Siri of the
future may provide, and a blueprint for how a growing wave of artificially
intelligent assistants will slot into our lives. The goal is a
human-enhancing and potentially indispensable assistant that could
supplement the limitations of our minds and free us from mundane and tedious
tasks.
Siris backers know Apples version of the assistant has not yet lived up to
its potential. The Siri team saw the future, defined the future and built
the first working version of the future, says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner
at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the two first venture capital firms to
invest in Siri. So its disappointing to those of us that were part of the
original team to see how slowly thats progressed out of the acquired
company into the marketplace.
But as a new wave of virtual assistants compete to take on our to-do lists,
Apple is under growing pressure to use the technology it already has and
turn Siri into the multitasking, proactive helper it once was. Siris
history suggests a fantastical future of virtual assistants is coming; where
we now see Siri as a footnote to the iPhones legacy, some day soon the
iPhone may be remembered as a footnote to Siri.
A kinder, gentler HAL is on its way to the mainstream for sure, says
Kittlaus. Siri is just a poster child, but it goes way, way beyond that.
REPORTING FOR DUTY AT NERD CITY
Thirty-five years after HALs big screen debut, turning the stuff of science
fiction into fact fell to perhaps the only organization with a more
outlandish imagination than a Lucas or Spielberg: the Defense Department.
In 2003, the agencys investment arm, DARPA, tapped the non-profit research
institute SRI International to lead a five-year, 500-person effort to build
a virtual assistant, one the government hoped might yield software to help
military commanders with both information overload and office chores.
Although it wasnt the projects mission, this helper, the Cognitive
Assistant that Learns and Organizes, or CALO, would ultimately provide the
inspiration and model for Siri.
The Defense Departments financial backing, $150 million in all, united
hundreds of top-tier artificial intelligence experts for an ambitious and
uncertain endeavor that most corporate R&D labs could only dream of
tackling: teaching computers to learn in the wild. The army of engineers at
nerd city one SRI researchers nickname for the lab were tasked with
creating a PC-based helper smart enough to learn by observing a users
behavior, and all the people, projects and topics relevant to her work. The
undertaking was by any measure, the largest AI program in history, says
David Israel, one of the lead researchers on CALO.
The CALO project was part of the PAL (Personal Assistant that Learns)
program, funded by the Defense Departments investment arm, DARPA.
At least to some people, it seemed as if the serious-minded federal
government was taking a flier on the stuff of 9-year-old boys sci-fi
fantasies.
CALO was put together at a time when many people said AI was a waste of
time, explains Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and associate professor
at Stanford University. It had failed multiple times, skepticism was high
and a lot of people thought it was a dumb idea.
Despite its naysayers, CALO proved a scientific triumph. The project
reunited, for the first time in decades, independent disciplines of
artificial intelligence that had been deemed too complex to cooperate.
It also demonstrated that a machine could learn in real time through its
lived experience, as a human being does. Previously, artificial intelligence
software had been coached in vitro, meaning a machine-learning algorithm
would be applied to a fixed set of data, then judged on how it handled that
information. Every part of CALO instead had to learn in vivo, training
itself as it performed tasks using an uncontrolled diet of information.
The SRI lab had a history of bringing the future to the present. Founded in
1946 by Stanford University trustees seeking research for the good of
society, SRI formally split from the university in 1970 and has operated
independently ever since. The institute leads research projects funded by
government agencies and corporations, then spins out its most promising
technologies into standalone startups. The inkjet printer, LCD screen and
Disneyland are all among the institutes brainchildren.
The Menlo Park lab also gained renown for counting, among its researchers,
Silicon Valley legend Doug Engelbart, who in the 1960s pioneered the
computer mouse and foresaw many of the basic computing tools we now take for
granted.
Adam Cheyer, an engineer at the institute, was already drawing comparisons
to Engelbart, well before he launched what would eventually become Siri. The
dark-haired, soft-spoken engineer a one-time Rubiks Cube champion who
could solve the puzzle in just 26 seconds shared not only Engelbarts
ingenuity, but also his people first approach to technology.
Engelbart maintained that machines should be used to augment human intellect
and capabilities. The objective was not trying to replace humans in any
respect, but trying to have devices, hardware and software that make humans
more effective at what they already do, explains Israel, who remembers
Cheyer and Engelbart having lengthy discussions in the research institutes
cafeteria.
Where other people saw chores on a to-do list, Cheyer saw learning
opportunities for virtual assistants. During an earlier stint at SRI in the
1990s, Cheyer, then straight out of a masters program in computer science,
built a small army of prototype assistants. Cheyers kitchen helper, for
example, could track the contents of his fridge and place grocery orders
online when milk ran low.
At SRI, Cheyer worked on assembling all the pieces produced by the CALO
projects 27 teams into a single assistant, which was required to take an
annual exam testing what it had learned over the course of the year. The
research-grade virtual assistant Cheyer helped build also called CALO
was still too rough around the edges to be installed in white-collar
workers office PCs. But CALO was capable of performing an impressive
variety of tasks that once seemed exclusive to human assistants.
Say your colleague canceled shortly before a meeting. CALO, knowledgeable
about each persons role on a project, could discern whether to cancel the
meeting, and if needed, reschedule, issue new invitations and pin down a
conference room. If the meeting went ahead as planned, CALO could assemble
(and rank) all the documents and emails youd need to be up to speed on the
topic at hand. The assistant would listen in on the meeting, and, afterward,
deliver a typed transcript of who said what and outline any specific tasks
laid out during the conversation. CALO was also able to help put together
presentations, organize files into folders, sort incoming messages and
automate expense reports, among a host of other tasks.
Cheyer split his time between training CALO and assisting SRIs Vanguard
program, a parallel effort launched in 2003 to help companies such as
Deustche Telekom and Motorola probe the future of a promising new gadget
called the smartphone. The Vanguard program developed its own prototype
assistant, more limited than CALO, but more feasible.
The prototype dazzled a general manager at Motorola by the name of Dag
Kittlaus.
A native mid-Westerner once likened to a
<http://www.editorsweblog.org/2005/11/14/mobile-wants-to-be-next-mass-market
-medium> baby-faced Nordic Brad Pitt, Kittlaus supplemented his office
routine with a daredevils diet of activities chasing tornadoes, jumping
from planes and earning a black belt in Hapkido. He was a sci-fi buff
partial to authors like Arthur C. Clarke (who helped pen the screenplay for
2001: A Space Odyssey) and would later set out to write his own novel set
in the distant future.
When Kittlaus failed to persuade Motorola to adopt Vanguards technology, he
quit the company in 2007 for a position as entrepreneur-in-residence at SRI.
Soon after, he found himself on a plane to California for a retreat with
Cheyer and several SRI colleagues. Their mission for the weekend: figure out
how to harness the best ideas from CALO and Vanguard to seed a startup.
It was at the Cypress Inn at Half Moon Bay, a quiet, coastal town just south
of San Francisco, that the vision for Siri was born. This mobile virtual
assistant like CALO, and in tune with Engelbarts thesis would be put to
work relieving humanity of low-grade mental busywork.
The working nickname for this assistant was HAL. The proposed tagline:
HALs back but this time hes good.
Virtual assistants had long proved a kind of siren song to an entire crew of
Silicon Valley dreamers that wound up shipwrecked in pursuit of a more
human, intelligent and helpful HAL.
Over a decade earlier, in 1994, Wildfire Communications debuted a new
telephone-based assistant, Wildfire, that could handle messages, place
calls and retrieve voicemail in response to a prompt. Wildfire earned good
reviews, but saw little pickup, despite the fact that she charmed users
with sassy responses. A few years later, Microsoft Offices assistant
Clippy, an over-eager bouncing paperclip volunteering tips and shortcuts,
launched to the chagrin of office workers everywhere. Eventually, Clippy
made TIMEs list of 50 worst inventions. In 1998, General Magics Portico
promised to connect the Internet and cell phones with a voice-controlled
aide that could read emails and take messages, among other tasks. Within
four years, the company shut down the assistant and filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy.
Yet if ever there were a right place and a right time for virtual
assistants, the fall of 2007 appeared to be it. Faster wireless speeds,
better speech recognition, the rise of cloud computing, the debut of Apples
iPhone and a flood of new web services made virtual helpers seem attainable
at last.
The SRI crew could see that the iPhone, which had launched just before their
excursion to Half Moon Bay, would yield a population of networked,
always-on-the-go consumers who would increasingly rely on tiny touch-screens
to tell them what to do. An assistant, in the form of a voice-controlled
iPhone app, seemed the ideal way to help mobile users complete all kinds of
tasks, without having to poke at small screens with fat fingers or wait for
web pages to load.
The aspiring entrepreneurs also had the advantage of being able to tap
CALOs technology. Under a law passed by Congress in 1980, nonprofits, like
SRI, were given the right to keep the profits flowing from software
developed via government-funded research. The law would allow a startup to
license key software from the CALO project in exchange for giving SRI a
stake in the company.
Though Cheyer had doubts CALO research could be used to create a profitable
business and was reluctant to leave his post at the lab, Kittlaus prevailed
on his innovation soulmate. The result was a new company named Siri, with
Kittlaus, as CEO, taking on co-founders Gruber, as chief technology officer,
and Cheyer, as vice-president of engineering.
Siris founding trio required prospective hires to read MIT professor
Michael Dertouzoss The Unfinished Revolution, a treatise arguing for
human-centric computing and devices that truly serve us, instead of the
other way around. If an applicant didnt agree with Dertouzos thesis, he
or she wasnt a match for Siri.
Once hired, new Siri employees were handed an empty frame and instructed to
keep a photo on their desks of the person whose vision most inspired their
work.
Cheyer framed a picture of another tech visionary who preached the people
first mentality: Doug Engelbart. Siris co-founders. Cheyer, Kittlaus and
Gruber.
Siri secured $8.5 million from investors in early 2008 and its progress over
the following months was absolutely breathtaking, says Morgenthaler, the
early Siri investor. Shawn Carolan, a partner at Menlo Ventures and another
Siri backer, recalls, Every board meeting was a breakthrough.
The founders enlisted their Siri prototype in a rigorous
artificial-intelligence boot camp of their own design, one meant to train
the assistant to understand, interpret and answer queries. When asked a
question, Siri, which processed information in a remote data center, would
send the audio of the speakers question to a server, where speech
recognition software would transcribe the spoken words.
Siri then had to figure out the words meaning what computer scientists
call natural language processing. People have dozens of ways of asking the
same thing, and while humans can deduce that the phrases, Im in the mood
for a croissant, Is there a bakery nearby? and Some French pastries
would be nice, all arrive at the same point, it takes a highly
sophisticated algorithm to reach that same conclusion.
The more traditional, error-prone approach to natural language processing
interpreted meaning by identifying the parts of speech in a sentence. But
Siri abandoned that method in favor of a breakthrough approach devised by
Cheyer and his colleagues. Instead of modeling linguistic concepts, their
system could model real-world objects. Told, I want to see a thriller,
Siri would immediately identify thriller as a film genre and summon up
movies rather than analyze how the subject connected to an object and a
verb.
Siri was able to map the contents of a question onto a domain of potential
actions, then pick the action that seemed most probable, based on its
understanding of the relationships between real-world concepts. (For
example, Siri knew a given restaurant should have a rating, an address, a
type of cuisine and a price range associated with it.) Siri could also apply
details about the time of day and a users preferences and location to
inform its response, or to ask for more information.
Picture Siri as a concierge in a noisy lobby. A request for the closest
coffee shop might sound like closest call Felicia over the din. But
knowing that closest is more likely to characterize a place than a person,
and that a guest is more likely to ask a concierge for dining tips, a human
hotelier would infer the asker was probably hankering for a cappuccino. Same
with Siri, which was tuned to listen for the kinds of phrases an employer
might use with a personal assistant and could get the gist of a question
without understanding every word. To avoid miscommunication, Siri also
allowed users to type, rather than speak, their questions into its
interface.
To pull a list of cafés, Siri would tap into data it had organized from over
40 web services that operated like remote, diffuse lobes of its brain. While
previous virtual assistants functioned through deep training in a single
specialty, Siri had been built as a cross-industry savant with expertise in
anything from books to bagels; it just needed access to the application
programming interfaces, or APIs, many web companies offer to third parties.
Early on, the Siri developers saw virtually no limit to the routine
transactions the assistant could automate. They envisioned Siris
architecture allowing for any web service with an API potentially hundreds
of thousands of them to add its database to the do engine.
But Siris creators also knew their virtual assistant would only succeed if
it was both smart and a smartass, both artificially intelligent and
artificially amusing.
Kittlaus and Saddler brainstormed snappy comebacks for all the offbeat
questions people were likely to ask the assistant. The co-founders also
dreamed of offering users a choice of different personality packs that
could be installed to make Siris answers sweeter or sassier. And because
Siri could recognize nuances in users speech mannerisms, its creators hoped
one day they might even build a Siri that could mimic peoples
personalities. Yo, yo what kind of flicks are playing, dude? might get
Siri to answer, Hey man, check out the new Eastwood flick. Word, according
to Kittlaus. The standalone Siri app, when it first launched in 2010.
In February 2010, three weeks after Siri debuted as an independently
developed iPhone app, Kittlaus received a call from a mystery number one
he nearly missed thanks to a glitchy, unresponsive iPhone screen.
It was Steve Jobs and he wanted to meet. The next day.
Siris co-founders spent three hours with Jobs at his Palo Alto home
discussing the future of do engines and how people could converse with
machines (Jobs loved Siris snark). Apple quickly followed up with an
interest in acquiring the young company.
The way that Steve described it, speech recognition and how to use it to
create a speech interface for something like the iPhone was an area of
interest to him and Scott Forstall [then head of Apples mobile software]
for some time, recalls Kittlaus. The story that Im told is that he
thought wed cracked that paradigm with our simple, conversational
interface.
Verizon thought so, too. In the fall of 2009, several months before Apple
approached Siri, Verizon had signed a deal with the startup to make Siri a
default app on all Android phones set to launch in the new year. When Apple
swooped in to buy Siri, it insisted on making the assistant exclusive to
Apple devices, and nixed the Verizon deal. In the process, it narrowly
avoided seeing Siri become a selling point for smartphones powered by its
biggest rival, Google. (Somewhere in the vaults of the wireless giant, there
are unreleased commercials touting Siri as an Android add-on.)
Its first and only app had barely been available for two full months. And
now Siri and its future belonged to Apple.
It was a storybook ending or beginning, you can call it, Kittlaus says.
AN ARTIFICIALLY-INTELLIGENT ORPHAN
With Siri and its entire 24-person team installed at Apples Cupertino
headquarters, the tech giant at once got down to tinkering with its new
acquisition.
Even as Apple amped up some features, it removed many of Siris powers by
disconnecting the assistant from most of the outside services that had
powered its digital brain. The restaurant reservation function, one of the
key features of the original Siri app in 2010, would be denied to iPhone
users until 2012.
Industry insiders say Apples size has hindered its ability to forge deals
with the dozens of services that once synced with Siri. Whereas partnering
with a startup in its embryonic stages was a simpler affair, brokering a
deal with the worlds most influential tech company, a high-stakes
undertaking by any measure, required many lawyers, meetings and spreadsheets
of cost-benefit analyses. Though Apple has the technology to pair Siri with
a multitude of sites and services and could use it soon it may not yet
have persuaded those potential partners to embrace a bigger Siri.
Apple also seems keen to ensure Siri will be decent for many users, rather
than genius for a few. Progress has been slowed by Apples need to localize
the assistant in the nearly 100 countries that offer the iPhone. Sending
Siri abroad requires training the assistant in dozens of different
languages, a time-intensive affair given the technical challenges of
teaching the algorithm to understand human speech.
People familiar with the early version of Siri gripe that Apple, usually so
meticulous about its products look and feel, has hidden Siris capabilities
with a design that over-promises on what Siri can deliver. To avoid
disappointing its users, the original Siri app tried to teach people what
they could ask by showing a screen of sample questions each time they
queried the assistant. Siris current layout largely leaves the assistants
abilities to the users imagination, even though it excels at only a very
specific subset of tasks. Apples slogan for Siri Your wish is its
command creates even more frustration by suggesting people should let
their dreams run wild and expect Siri, the genie in the iPhone, will fulfill
any desire.
Apple also must wrestle with the fact that Siri isnt always a great
listener, especially in the places its likely to be used most. Speech
recognition software is still iffy in noisy settings, and especially has
trouble decoding the low-quality audio that Bluetooth headsets send to Siri
so good luck chatting with Siri while youre driving a car. That problem
is likely to be temporary, however, as better data and more sophisticated
models help machines become ever-more in tune with human speech.
Already, Apples assistant does seem to be getting sharper: Investment bank
Piper Jaffray raised Siri
<http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/20/google-now-vs-apple-siri/> s grade
from a D to a C after a test of its skills last December found Siri
could understand 91 percent of queries and correctly answer 77 percent of
them.
But corporate politics have been unkind to Siri, and the endeavors
prospects may be jeopardized by its loss of many powerful advocates within
Apple. Though Saffo, the Stanford professor and futurist, cautions
deciphering Apples inner workings is like trying to understand North
Korea, he ventures that Siri has become an artificially-intelligent
orphan within the company.
Only one of Siris three co-founders, Tom Gruber, remains at the company.
Kittlaus left three weeks after Apple re-launched Siri in 2011, and Cheyer
quit a year later. Apples Forstall, who introduced Siri at its first
keynote and oversaw the companys iOS software, was fired last year. Steve
Jobs died the day after Siri debuted. And Luc Julia, who replaced Kittlaus
as head of Siri, lasted just 10 months at Apple before leaving in 2012.
Siri offered the first mass-market assistant capable of understanding
humans natural speech patterns and assembling information from disparate
parts of the Internet into a single, correct response. That model, one Siri
pioneered, has been embraced by a growing wave of artificial intelligence
engineers and entrepreneurs keen to pioneer their own version of HAL.
The virtual assistants now coming to the market are trying to provide many
of the same capabilities offered in the early version of Siri, and CALO
before it. Even Apple has been slowly reinstating some of the capabilities
Siri once offered, such as movie reviews and restaurant bookings.
Having seen Siris success, Silicon Valley startups are now mining the CALO
project to build a race of assistants tailored to work in specialized
fields. Desti is an artificially intelligent assistant specializing in
travel; Lola is a Siri for banking; and Kuato is leveraging CALO research
to build a learning assistant.
More than half a dozen Siri-like services launched in 2012 alone. Samsung
debuted S-Voice, a voice-controlled assistant. Nuance, a provider of speech
recognition software, released a Siri for apps called Nina. Startups Evi
and Maluuba each released virtual assistant apps. IBM is working on adapting
its supercomputer Watson into a turbo-charged Siri that can help physicians,
farmers, Wall Street traders and high-schoolers. And Google has followed
Siri with its own conversational assistant, Google Now.
The idea is not to ask one question and get an answer, but to have the
assistant proceed with me in a conversation and go and do things for me,
says Scott Huffman, an engineering director who oversees Googles mobile
search efforts. Its a vision that sounds remarkably like the one Siris
founders first embraced.
Futurists and researchers predict such voice-controlled software, like Siri
and Google Now, will take us from understanding how to use technology to
technology that understands us.
Were moving more and more towards an interface like the interface we have
with each other, says Saffo. Our whole trend is toward ever more intimate
interactions with machines [...] and with each phase, machines are doing
something ever more central to our lives.
These ever more central tasks include everything from taking care of lifes
little hassles to actually shaping what we do. Siris founders had planned
to make the assistant a source of personalized advice and wisdom by
implanting Siri with CALOs cutting-edge learning skills. Siri would have
taken it upon itself to summon information that hadnt specifically been
requested.
Googles assistant is going a step further, volunteering information before
its even been asked. Google Now masters its users routines so it can
proactively fetch game updates for sports fans or advise users to leave
early for a meeting due to traffic. (As Google chairman Eric Schmidt bluntly
told the Wall Street Journal in 2010
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212.h
tml> , [People] want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.)
A few years from now, as you walk through the mall, your virtual assistant
will tell you where to shop for shoes by factoring in your wardrobe, time
frame and cash flow. When you step into a store, you consult the options the
assistant has lined up for you. The calfskin loafers are a must, it
whispers, at the same time cautioning that the purchase would put you over
your monthly budget. If you do splurge, it suggests you request a cash
advance, and the assistant offers to contact your bank. While youre paying,
the assistant, knowing that youve been going to a lot of museums lately,
offers updates on current exhibits. Or, thanks to emotion-recognition
technology that infers your mood from your facial expressions, it senses
youre feeling down and cracks some jokes. At the office, another assistant
might take over. Before your date, yet another could counsel you on your
love life. Where does that leave humans?
Siri investor Shawn Carolan, like many others, imagines well be more
productive. Take everything you do in a day and just condense it down from
15 minutes down to 30 seconds. You can just express your intent, and it gets
done, explains Carolan. You just become a 30 times more powerful human.
With its own reach and Siris software, Apple could still fulfill the do
engine dream. If it took advantage of Siris early architecture that used
web services APIs to feed the assistants ever-expandable brain, Siri would
have the potential to automate a multitude of tasks.
Morgenthaler argues that with this technology, Siri could do for thousands
of activities what Amazon has done for shopping. Under Apple, Siri could
one day
book flights, order flowers and offer fashion advice, becoming what former
CALO program director James Arnold calls an iTunes for everything else in
the world.
Siri, the startup, took a commission anytime someone made a purchase via the
app. Were Apple ever to do the same, it could tap into an entirely new
source of cash.
Arnold also sees virtual assistants as intellectual equalizers. A superb
memory might cease to be an advantage as intelligent assistants are tasked
with remembering names, dates and other details. Everyone will have the
ability to see unusual but important connections between legal cases or
patients symptoms, thanks to assistants that can identify relevant
precedents or files.
The future of virtual personal assistants is to make it so we dont have to
think so much and work so hard to do things that are possible, says
Kittlaus. Its less about survival and more about exploring the world.
Yet for all the efficiencies these do engines may provide, they may also
carry a significant risk. Evan Selinger, a fellow at the Institute for
Ethics and Emerging Technologies, argues that less friction in our lives may
render us more vulnerable to being automatic, and eliminate crucial
opportunities for moral deliberation. The digital servant becomes the
digital overlord, and we dont even recognize it.
They might also make us an easy target for an algorithm that knows more
about our bad habits and indulgences than we do, and isnt above exploiting
them. The stream of suggestions from virtual assistants, especially if
advertisers have a say, could make us more susceptible to overeating and
over-spending. A spouse knows not to encourage you to stop by the steakhouse
given your heart condition. But would Siri? Or Google Now if Google got a
big ad buy from the steakhouse? Would Siri nag you into becoming your best
self or would it cuddle and humor you into a state of blissful complacency?
By freeing us of the irritants and drudgeries of life that keep us from
pursuing our more serious interests, the promise of virtual assistants
offers a release into an inconceivably higher state of being. As the
mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed, Progress is
measured by what you no longer have to think about.
But progress toward what? That may be one of the few questions our
assistants wont be able to answer.
This story appears in Issue 33 of our weekly iPad magazine, Huffington, in
the iTunes App store
<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/huffington./id517151550?ls=1&mt=8> .
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