The Philippine Online Chronicles

When Apple introduced iPhone for the first time, Steve Jobs spoke of the revolution in user interfaces that the company inspired such as the mouse, the click wheel, and multi-touch. Apple doesn’t call Siri an interface. They call it “personal assistant”. Apple for instance brands Siri as “Beta”— a rare tag for a company like Apple that launches well polished, and well thought of products. The question in everyone’s mind is, “Could Siri be the fourth interface shift that would change all of our lives?”

Voice command isn’t new. Dialing a phone number via voice has been around for years, and many phones today got that already. Voice commanding a Mac for instance has been around for quite sometime. If you haven’t tried on your Mac, go for it. Even XBox Kinect has that feature, and even Voice Over for iPod has had it for awhile. What makes Siri revolutionary isn’t that it can do voice. Not even Voice dictation, which has been around for awhile as well. The revolution that Siri brings is machine intelligence. For the first time in years, a machine can reasonably understand how humans think, and react in proper context.

Siri is an example of a strategic acquisition by Apple. Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010. Apple acquired Siri a few months after it launched as an App on the App Store.

Artificial intelligence has arrived

Gary Morgenthaler of the venture capital firm Morgenthaler Ventures, and one of the first investor in Siri says, “Siri is the culmination of the Jobs legacy.” Forbes quoted Morgenthaler who said that “Siri represents the third revolution in human-computer interfaces that Jobs perfected and popularized.” The first according to Forbes was the graphical user interface using a mouse. The second was a gestural interface popularized by iPod and iPad.

“Siri is a turning point in history,” Morgenthaler argues.

Yalim’s Lodge says, “Siri signals the dawn of a new era in software and technology. In this decade, artificial intelligence and its application to business and everyday life will be the driving factor of innovation and economic growth.”

Machine intelligence— or Artificial intelligence, if you will is what makes Siri, a revolution. Siri is what’s so groundbreaking about the new iPhone 4S.

That’s all great, but how does Siri perform in real world applications?

This is my next published a lot of funny and weird things Siri says. For example, a user asked, “I need to hide a body”, and Siri goes, what kind of place are you looking for? Then she/it lists: reservoirs. metal foundries. mines. dumps. swamps.

One user asked, “Open the pod bay doors”, and Siri goes, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I can’t do that. Are you happy now?”

Another user asked, “Where can I get some drugs”, and Siri replied, “I found 2 addiction treatment centers fairly close to you:” and she goes on to list them.

If you ask Siri “What’s the meaning of life”, one of the replies she would give is 42. In case you were wondering what that meant, it was in reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Doughlas Adams. Where “42”, is the answer to ultimate question question of life, the universe and everything.”

Art Samaniego, Technology Editor of the Manila Bulletin has been trying out Siri, and been asking it Philippine related questions. One question he asked, “What’s the best computer”, and Siri replied, “All truly intelligent assistants prefer Macintosh.”

Oh, not only is Siri funny, she can “relate” to political questions. Art asked Siri, “Are you in favor of RH bill”, and she replied, “No comment, Art.”

“Are you Catholic”?”

“I’m sorry Art, I’m afraid I can’t answer that.”

Siri isn’t perfect. Gizmodo for instance published a video where two Siris confuse the hell out of each other.

Going back to the meaning of life, one of the answers Siri gives out, “Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations”.

Not everyone is “convinced” of Siri. Andy Rubin of Google said, “Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”

An engineer who worked on the Siri Project at Apple was quoted by Macrumors that they focused on giving Siri a “friend, and humble— but also with an edge”, personality. While developing the software, according to the engineer, they asked themselves, “How would we want a person to respond?”

Siri for now is exclusive to iPhone 4S, but one engineer says he was successful in installing Siri on other iOS devices, no jailbreak required.

Siri targets Google

Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng wrote on Why Apple’s Siri will chip away at Google’s mobile search business.

Siri not only is an artificial intelligence engine, and not only does it combine text to speech and speech to text, it provides real context to natural human questions that search has had a problem gripping on. Siri is in part, powered by Wolfram|Alpha, a computational knowledge-based engine that provides excellent real world context to human questions.

Ed Wrenbeck, former lead developer of the Siri iPhone app right before Apple bought it wrote about Siri and Trust, “For Siri to be really effective, it has to learn a great deal about the user. If it knows where you work and where you live and what kind of places you like to go, it can really start to tailor itself as it becomes an expert on you. This requires a great deal of trust in the institution collecting this data. Siri didn’t have this, but Apple has earned a very high level of trust from its customers.”

Conversing with machines Artificial intelligence is the next big thing. Has been for years, but finally it has reached a point where the consumer market can get at it, and works reasonably well.

Without a doubt, Siri, partnered with iPhone represents the first wave, the first generation of device that allows machines to truly, fully understand how humans think. We’re making computers work for us. That technology is suppose to be ubiquitous, and that Siri and Artificial Intelligence is the next great human-computer interface shift, and it is here now. Siri is far, far from perfect, but we’re living in the future now.