Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Nova Spivack, CEO of of Radar Networks, the company behind Twine
A new paradigm for using the Internet is about to begin: Virtual Assistants (VA’s) are coming to a mobile device near you.
This week, a stealth startup will demonstrate the first public version of their mobile virtual assistant, Siri. This may mark the beginning of the era of consumer-grade virtual assistants on the Web.
Siri is focused on mobile devices – particularly the iPhone and other smart phones, it has an unusually productive interface and user experience, and it is super useful – it is something I would really use every day. As a result I would not be surprised if Siri becomes one of the top iPhone applications within a few months after their launch. (Disclosure: In the past, I worked on the DARPA-funded CALO project from which Siri sprung).
The team at Siri has given me a sneak-preview of their technology and product, and here I will dive deep to try to uncover the real significance and technical underpinnings of what they are doing. In addition, I’ll delve into the implications of the virtual assistant (VA) trend and what it might mean for us in the future.
This is a two-part article. In Part One, here, I cover the basics of Siri as a product, and the Virtual Assistant paradigm compared to search. In Part Two I will go more deeply into the technological foundations and questions.
First Look at Siri, the Product
Siri is a virtual assistant that is focused on helping consumers complete tasks in their online lives, particularly in the mobile context. The version I looked at runs on the iPhone.
Typical use cases are booking dinner reservations, buying movie tickets, getting local information, or finding things to do in your local area.
Siri is integrated with the APIs of a “couple of dozen familiar big brand” partners, according to Siri CTO, Tom Gruber, and part of their core technology involves being able to orchestrate and complete tasks across multiple services at once for users.
On the iPhone you simply launch Siri and then proceed to interact using a familiar “chat” interface. You make requests or state goals to Siri, and then Siri comes back with answers, questions or suggested actions.
You can type to Siri in natural language and it does a pretty solid job of parsing your requests. But more impressive is that you can simply push the talk button on your phone and speak to Siri and it understands you. No need to type. It works surprisingly well. I also like the visual interface – Siri illustrates the progress of each dialogue with nicely illustrated cartoon speech balloons. It’s super easy to follow the conversation.
It’s worth noting here that a speech interface to a Virtual Assistant on mobile phones could probably save lives if drivers used it instead of texting (recent research has found that 1 in 4 USA drivers admit to texting while they drive).
Siri is not the only company to offer a push-to-talk speech interface on the iPhone – Google provides one too. But what makes Siri unique is that this takes place within a dialogue, a conversation with your virtual assistant. Siri usually responds with an answer or a follow-up question to whatever you start with.
Mobile devices provide numerous challenges, as well as useful information, that make them the perfect venue for a virtual assistant. The main challenges of the mobile platform are screen size, input constraints, and bandwidth. Siri has addressed each of these issues.
Siri addresses the screen size issue by not forcing users to type lots of text or look at pages and pages of results. Instead, all interactions take place within compact and user-friendly chat balloons. This is a good fit for the small size of mobile screens.
Siri makes input easier as well. While you may type if you want to, Siri allows you to simply speak, using your voice, to give it questions or follow-up information.
As for bandwidth, Siri conserves it by reducing the need to surf. For example, if you want to book dinner, just tell Siri and it will do it for you, via OpenTable, without you having to surf through the entire OpenTable site to do so. This is a big timesaver.
Siri also takes advantage of information from your mobile device about your GPS location and time information about the your present context. These enable Siri to localize information.
For example, while you are out and about you can use Siri to discover a great place to eat, get tickets to a show, plan your weekend, or get help finding your way around town. Simply ask Siri, what movies are showing, and it will show you movies that are near your location and that you can still get to. Or ask it about restaurants and it will suggest restaurants you might like near your present location.
Beyond simply suggesting things to do, Siri can also do the legwork of making reservations, and orchestrating your plans, across multiple different services.
For example, suppose you want to book dinner and a movie – Siri can do it for you, as a single transaction, making sure that dinner is near enough to the movie that you can reasonably accomplish both without rushing or being late.
Siri knows about events in your area, things to do, what’s happening. It also knows about your personal context (your location, your current time of day), your preferences, and your personal information that you share with it.
By combining knowledge of your local situation and your personal profile, Siri is able to help you complete tasks – like finding a cool thing to do on a Sunday afternoon – in ways that are uniquely targeted to your particular interests and personality.
Of course, it will require a lot more testing to determine how well Siri really does this – and how personalized it can be. The current version is not very personalized from what I can tell, however according to Kittlaus, this is very much on their radar for future development.
According to Gruber:
“Siri deals with the hassle of accessing multiple sites to explore options, make choices, get reservations and buy tickets. It saves your favorites, keeps track of your bookings, and helps you remember what you liked about a place or event. It helps you invite your friends to things you arrange with Siri. It does things that a personal assistant would do for you using the Internet.”
“Siri is like having an assistant with an internet connection you can call for help when you’re out. For example, you might say ‘Hey, I’m at Market and Dolores. Is that modern art museum in the Mission area still open, and how do I get there? And isn’t there a cool Asian fusion restaurant around there? Can you book me a table at 8:00?’ You literally *say* what you want in your own words using voice. It’s not a voice recognition veneer on other products. It gets what you want to do on a whole new level.”
Limited by Design
Siri is limited by design — it’s not full artificial intelligence. But this is actually a strength, not a weakness. Instead of trying to solve the grand problems of general purpose artificial intelligence, Siri focuses on a few important vertical domains, for example: restaurants, movies, events, local business, weather, and services and data on the Web that relate to them.
These limitations mean that Siri doesn’t handle general knowledge or tasks outside its focus area. So what can’t it do?
Siri can’t do general question answering, like Wolfram Alpha or True Knowledge, although the team says that in some cases it can provide answers to questions it knows about, and this feature could be improved in the future.
For now, Siri’s knowledge is extremely limited and narrow to just the kinds of tasks it helps complete. It wasn’t designed to be a knowledge assistant. It won’t help you organize information and it won’t help you with your homework.
In addition, Siri doesn’t have much personality; it doesn’t try to be your chat friend or therapist (remember Eliza?) and its not particularly cute or anthropomorphic (Microsoft’s ill-fated Bob agent) either – these are all pluses in my opinion. Finally, in terms of task-completion, its core focus, it is still limited to fairly simple kinds of tasks (like making dinner and movie reservations for you). It can’t do complex planning and purchasing decisions, like planning an entire vacation.
Where is Siri headed? The Siri team has started by taking on very common, frequent use cases. But the technology is built to scale to new domains as well as to a larger user base. So I would not be surprised to see lots of other things that assistants do coming on line as Siri matures (The CALO project that Siri comes from, was deep in “office assistant” use cases such as scheduling, travel planning, meeting assistance, organizing and learning).
It’s important to keep in mind that Siri is just getting started, so don’t expect it to do your laundry or manage your finances. It won’t pass the Turing test either and it’s not the beginning of Skynet (not unless Siri somehow mates with Wolfram Alpha…). It’s a simple, useful tool, with an impressive amount of intelligence behind it. I am looking forward to the public release. Siri shows promise making smart phones far more productive and useful for consumers.
Not a Google Killer – Task Completion vs. Search
Before I go too far, I want to state in no uncertain terms that Siri is not a “Google killer.” Siri is not trying to solve the general Web search problem (neither is Wolfram Alpha, for that matter), it’s trying to do something quite different. Siri is focused on completing tasks for you, not finding Web pages.
Siri is shifting the interaction paradigm for the Web from search to assistance. While both search and assistance depend on understanding user intent, the “assistant paradigm” derives user intent through conversation with the user, instead of just a single set of keywords.
Furthermore, while the goal of search is simply to provide a set of relevant Web pages, the goal of assistance is task completion – actually doing something for the user, like for example, booking dinner reservations or buying a ticket to a concert.
As Tom Gruber, CTO of Siri, explained to me:
- The current interaction paradigm for the Internet is the search engine. The contract of the search engine with the user is this: you state your intent as search keywords, and it returns links to matching information sources. The measure of quality for a search engine is relevance: i.e., how well links that it returns provide the information needed by the user.
- The assistant paradigm changes the contract. You express intent in a conversation, as a request or goal statement (”I need an X” or “I want to do Y”). The assistant asks you for clarifying information if needed, and guides you through the process of exploring options and making a choice. The measure of quality for an assistant is task completion: i.e., how well it helps you solve the problem that you expressed in the conversation.
Both interaction paradigms are important, but they serve different purposes.
When the task is to find information and the problem can be solved by reaching a web page, the search engine paradigm is optimal.
When the task is to solve a problem involving personal context, preference, or choice, and when applying multiple information sources to a task, the assistant paradigm is better suited.
Siri is not competing with Google. Siri is focused on task completion, not search.
However, because task completion is often focused around commercial activities – buying or selling things — it’s potentially as or more monetizable than search. This is because task completion uncovers consumer intent more explicitly than search.
In search, user-intent has to be guessed at from keywords and clicks. But in task completion, user-intent is directly explained by the user – because the user can state their goals directly, and refine their intent in a conversation. Search queries can be about anything, but assistants know what kind of information is relevant to a task. This is why conversation works for tasks: the user can state a goal, perhaps vaguely; the assistant can offer refinements; the user can choose among them; and the conversation quickly converges on a solution. “Conversion” in this context is not coercion, it is cooperation between the human user and the software assistant that is trying to help them.
Consumers use search engines even when they are not in a buying or doing mood, but with a service like Siri a higher percentage of user interactions have true commercial intent. By helping a consumer make a purchase, presumably Siri and other task completion assistants will share in the downstream revenues they help generate.
In conclusion, while Siri does not compete with Google in Google’s core market (search and advertising), one can easily imagine task completion, and the ensuing commerce transactions it generates, becoming a huge opportunity – one that I would expect Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others to want to compete in eventually.
Virtual Assistants: The Paradigm
The idea of Virtual Assistants (VA’s) was not invented by the Siri team. It’s an idea that has been around for decades. It has roots in Apple’s famous “Knowledge Navigator” video, and in the original intelligent agents and DARPA work that inspired the invention of the Semantic Web. Even luminaries such as Google’s own Peter Norvig have worked on agents in the past. What’s more, it’s been an elusive vision, evading the best attempts of several startups of the past, such as the once-super-hot General Magic with their Magic Cap operating system.
While General Magic had the right idea, they were too far ahead of their time. Ultimately the Web proved simpler to implement and adopt. Perhaps today the time is right, or at least better, for this to happen at last. In particular several trends make it much easier to build an intelligent agent product today, including:
- The increasing amount of structured data on the Web (in XML, and even RDF)
- The wide availability of open API’s for services that provide information and commercial transactions.
- The global adoption of the Web and the simultaneously increasing need for smarter tools to help cope with it
- The growing adoption of 3G smartphones and other mobile computing devices
There are many different kinds of intelligent software agents that have been studied and tested over the years. Some agents are designed purely to interact with other agents, and with other software. But others are designed to interact with humans to help them get things done. These “virtual assistants” are what Siri is focused on.
Instead of a Web where consumers have to shoulder the burden of manually searching for things themselves, we are moving to a Web where intelligent agents will assist consumers to meet their goals through a conversational dialogue.
The key to the virtual assistant paradigm is conversation. When we interact with a virtual assistant it will not be like using a search box on a search engine. Search boxes are not conversational. You type some keywords, and you get some results. The end. With Virtual assistants the user-interaction is framed as a dialogue with the assistant, in natural language, not keywordese.
VA’s are like real-world assistants – they are two-way interactive; they may offer suggestions, they may ask questions. And this is very important, because it prevents the risk of our virtual assistants going off and doing things we don’t want them to do. In short they only do what they are asked to do, and before they do it, they double-check by asking for permission. So there is no risk, for example, of VA’s going off and trading stocks on your behalf, or buying things for you, without your permission.
Being first to a new market opportunity is not always best, as history has shown. However, I believe Siri has done a better job than most at creating a powerful technology base and a compelling user experience, well enough before the competition to have a real shot at leading this category.
Part Two: How Siri Works – The Technical Stuff
In the second part of this preview of Siri, I will provide my exclusive in-depth interview with Siri’s CTO, Tom Gruber, about the underlying technology behind Siri: Click here to read Part-Two.
It seems to me more like an advertisement of Siri from a marketing guy at the company. Doesn’t seem like an independent blog post. Not a usual tech crunch read !!
Sounds like a great app. Will give it a try.
sponsor?
Great article
Wish I could get my hands on the app. When is it coming out?
Agree with Tahir… seems like a sponsored post for a seemingly cool app.
A better independent review would be nice though.
The author mentioned his affiliation in the 3rd paragraph:
>> Disclosure: In the past, I worked on the DARPA-funded CALO project from which Siri sprung
Its good that the author mentioned it.
The most annoying online chat or phone based help systems are those that are automated and yet attempt to emulate human interaction, which only slows down the retrieval process.
When I’m trying to retrieve information from a database I don’t want to have a conversation with it.
Numerous other mobile applications such as Around Me focus on easy access to location aware data in a usable interface that requires little or no input, and certainly not a lengthy chat with a “AI” system, which would be more appropriately termed an Automated Response system. Unless of course the system is smart enough not just to find me a Thai restaurant but to learn what Thai food is from me if it didn’t already know, and then apply that knowledge for the next user.
Summary: AR != Artificial Intelligence. AR = Annoying Robot.
Locutus said…
When I’m trying to retrieve information from a database I don’t want to have a conversation with it.
There are applications that you need this sort of capabilities. For example, if you’re a physician trying to find the correct procedure of treatments (ie, correct diagnosis) for a patient in front of you. Considering that diagnosis of patients is a complex domain, the physician does indeed need to be guided by having a conversation-like dialogue with the system in order for him/her to find appropriate information that may help him.
So, if someone already know the information, then he/she doesn’t need such automated assistant, if he/she doesn’t know how to navigate a problem he faces, then it is best to get the automated assistant to help.
Automated software agent is not new. Everyone remembers the annoying Clippy, the Microsoft Office Assistant that pops up every time when you open the Microsoft Words application or open a new word document. Clippy pops up and dances around waiting to have a dialogue with the user (if he/she chooses) in order to guide or answer any question that the user wants to know or ask.
Software agent is now move into the internet application development including those in mobiles.
For those who are new to (or never heard about) software agents, the best introductory book is by Dr. Peter Norvig of Google (& Stewart Russell), with title:
Artificial Intelligence: Modern Approach
where it is covered in Chapter 6 and Chapter 22.
I have the first edition, but as I understand that there are later editions of this book, with more stuff being added.
This book is a good start, before you (the reader) can go on to more advance books (available from Amazon) on the subject.
In terms of software-agent open-source, the best out there at the moment is JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Framework). The API is easy to learn (even to first time users) and it is quite popular with developers especially mobile & web applications. JADE is FIPA compliant (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agent), which is an IEEE Computer Society industry standards.
Software agents is state-of-the-art cutting-edge technology of today where research publications of recent times have shown the combination of agents with machine learning, ie, agents that learns & adapts to its environment.
What Siri is developing is the future. The future has arrived via Siri. This application is going to get better and better, as its knowledge-base grows over time (ie, more knowledgeable), if they do use one. What Siri brings is state-of-the-art, it looks like that they’re the first commercial app out there that has context-aware capability. Some applications that are frequently covered here at TC that purported to be location-aware are in fact location-based or location-tracking and not location-aware. There is a huge difference. The aware is done by the human and not the software application. The software has no inference mechanism at all. From Nova’s description of Siri’s technology, it seems that the Siri team is going to fully implement context-awareness capability (either limited capability initially and then full awareness capability at a later stage). See, what Siri offers is that the software itself does the awareness and not the user. In contrast to location-tracking applications that are frequently covered here at TC, the awareness is done by the user and not the software.
Well done to Siri’s team in bringing their technology to market (state-of-the-art).
An interesting paper on using MAS (multi agent system) as a mobile tourist guide assistant, which also have context-aware capability and using CBR (case-based-reasoning) according to the authors.
Abstract:
——-
Applications for mobile devices have some restrictions because of the limited capabilities and heterogeneity of these devices. However, their communication capabilities allow the distribution of the application control and access to information in a network. If we also consider the changing environment when a user moves from one location to another, we should have software that is context-aware and able to adapt to new situations. Agent technology can support these requirements because of its distributed nature and the ability to combine flexible component architectures, some of them with planning and learning capabilities, which are appropriate for adapting to changing environments. In this paper we show one such application, a mobile tourist guide service, which has been built as a multi-agent system, where some agents are deliberative and combine the Beliefs-Desires-Intentions approach with learning capabilities of Case Base Reasoning techniques.
Title : Mobile Tourist Guide Services with Software Agents
Since mobile applications market is over-crowded with unintelligent applications, where anyone using software-agents will definitely give an edge/advantage, since the load is shifted from the user to the software, ie, the software will tend to automate most things if possible and the user won’t have to do much (hassle-free). I see Siri has an edge here.
Does the speech recognition occur on the phone, or on a back end server? For example, does Siri have to record your voice and then deliver it to a back-end server, which means you have to wait for it to upload your query in audio first to a server, or does it process the audio in real time on the iPhone and do the recognition on the iPhone itself?
This is the most in-depth article I’ve seen on TechCrunch in a while. Excellent.
So hold up…are you affiliated or not with the company…?
How long before an insane, malfunctioning version called ‘Giri’ is available?
This entire post is also suspect. I find it hard to believe that the author has zero connection to the company producing this app and nothing to gain in either a financial or business/networking relationship with the company from writing such a glowing review. The same is probably true for TC. If that suspicion is correct this this worse than a pay-to-post arrangement, since TC has just handed over the blog to someone to post an advertisement.
Neither Nova, the guest author, nor TC have any current relationship with Siri. Nova knows the people behind Siri, and is obviously excited about its prospects. He was one of about 400 researchers who worked on a different part of the CALO project.
So take his bias into account, but he knows a lot more about the underlying technology than most people. If you don’t find the prospect of virtual assistants finally taking off interesting, then skip to the next post.
Erick: Glad you replied to the lame flamers who don’t seem to have the patience to read a) the disclaimer and b) a very interesting, although lengthy article about what looks like a next gen tech product offering a smart solution using virtual agent software.
How much did Siri pay for this long boring post?
Web 3.0?
Hey look…. it’s an infomercial
I would rather see a 2 minute video than part 1 of a treatise on how great the app is going to be. Post a video and let us judge for ourselves.
Why does everyone think this is sponsored?It would have been mentioned if it was sponsored .isnt it?
… and the app is not even available, at least on the iPhone.. Really bad timing.
to me it seems like sort of a good idea, but pointless. Why go through the extra step of going through siri when i can open the weather widget directly, google movies,.. in general go directly to where i want. Most things on the iphone are pretty easy to do without going through a middle man.
The natural language conversation with the web broadens: Siri virtual assistant takes in spoken requests to help complete simple tasks.
Interesting, but they’re missing a very important point here. I will let them figure that out. There is a similar apps that will be released hopefully this summer called iKcul (twitter.com/KculShare)
Looking forward to growth of VAs as XML and the semantic web grows and becomes more accessible via mobile computing devices.
Release it for the Symbian OS and I’d be all over giving it a test run.
HOLY CRAP!…. i must try.
eh …not even available to try it yet. bleh.
Tom will be demonstrating Siri in his keynote presentation at the Semantic Technology Conference, in San Jose, June 14-18.
http://www.sema...m/session/1909/
I think VA’s like this will solve the classic Chicken/Egg problem for the Semantic Web/Linked Data vision of the web.
In the past, Sem Web apps have been weak because nobody marks up their pages with RDF/OWL semantic markup languages. Nobody wants to mark up their pages because there are no apps to utilize the markup, so why invest the time?
In this case, if a website doesn’t structure their data to some extent, and their competitor does, they will be invisible to a virtual agent, and will therefore lose customers.
It could be that “killer app” that kick starts semantic markup, therefore creating an environment for other semantic applications to utilize in other ways.
Since the monetization of this service was mentioned, I’m wondering how that might motivate the returned search results.
If I ask for a good thai food restaurant, will the “good” part be provided by (somewhat) independent reviews, or will it be more like the hotel concierge who gets a kickback for all the reservations she makes for guests?
Will queries for a “good steak place” get responses from the highest bidder?
At least with a true search, I can potentially evaluate the reliability of the returned results by reading them.
Arrington, you have sunk to the lowest level yet. This sort of advertisement should be illegal.
I think the article is very insightful and balanced.
It clearly states what the app cannot do well, and also where the strengths and opportunities are.
Not sure what you people are talking about. Maybe you all should actually read the article before commenting LOL!
One of the most detailed tech reviews I’ve seen in TechCrunch in fact. Kudos to Arrington and team!
So Siri:
1. Presumably makes money by getting kickbacks from the service providers. Does/will this effect it’s ‘recommendations’?
2. Builds a database of your personal preferences. Sounds like a great asset to sell to advertisers. Wouldn’t it be just great if you used a service like this which tied your phone number to your personal preferences and then got hit with a mountain of SMS spam sometime down the track?
Don’t Google offer something similar already in their voice search for iPhone? I imagine Siri to be smarter, and maybe I won’t have to affect a US accent to use it properly lol
I’ll keep my comment short: What’s wrong with being succinct, Nova?
whoa…….its like my Aida idea but without the actual avatar to visually represent the VA nor the web infastructure to tie it into multiple devices and completely lacking AI, AI algorithms, meta data and aggregate data so in all honesty its nothing more then a bot with very limited functionality
although limited and specific functionality might be the whole point as third party apps, plug ins and services could flourish on top of this to fill the void or you could roll out a steady flow of features down the road to keep it relevant…
but my vision was for a VA to work it needs to be able to do the following:
-filter alerts, newsfeeds RSS and data aggregates from multiple sources for the user and be able to relay them to the user thru multiple mediums by importance and relevance as configured by the user
-needs to have a capacity to learn and share
-needs to be able to aggregate personality and mood via gauging it as much as possible with audio cues like voice pitch, tone, loudness, speed ect
-needs to know or aggregate the likes and dislikes of the user to provide accurate recommendations
-needs a customizable avatar to visually represent the VA
- can utilize multiple mediums, phone call sms email IM fax ect as well as directly via the app or web to facilitate communication with user
- and it needs to be able to do voice recog functionality like voice to text and what not
-also it needs to be able to update calender events, to do lists, status updates, bang out emails or grp texts read/write files and data and access or interact with apps and services
-natural language search or something like wolfram alpha is a must to lock down casual usage and common question queries
although I realize that my Aida concept might be a bit ambitious and a little feature creep but the way i see it you gotta go big or go home with VA’s
but anyways Kudos for getting it all together and making it happen thats more then I could accomplish for sure
best of luck
D
For comparison’s sake, you might check out Microsoft’s Wilma. Add wilma@live.com to your Windows Live Messenger and say “hi”.
Timothy Kay says:
hi
- Wilma – says:
What’s up?
Timothy Kay says:
I’d like to see a movie.
- Wilma – says:
Please wait while I retrieve that information from MSN Movies…
Here are the movies currently playing in 94024.
(I’ll show you in the activity window.)
Timothy Kay says:
What’s the weather in Seattle?
- Wilma – says:
It’s terrific weather in Seattle (WA) today – sunny and mild temperatures.
(I’ll show you in the activity window.)
Timothy Kay says:
What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
- Wilma – says:
What do you mean? An African or a European swallow?
For those who don’t know this, Tom Gruber has a strong academic background in the field of Knowledge Representation/AI. It may be a good indicator of the basis of Siri, which looks interesting.
Indeed the ear of VA is coming. Siri is quite a cool thing – wish I lived in US and could test it.
Check http://Inteliwise.com – they offer virtual assistans focused on customer service – it can reduce your customer staff workload by 20% I belive (and can serve 80% of FAQs people would call in with)
they got fully integrated product plus the lady on the webiste is smokin hot:)
I agree that this is quite cool but not necessarily the best application of the technology. I already have geo-ware apps on my iPhone then quickly tell me local restaurants, bars, banks etc.; and if i want weather I’ll go to WeatherBug for the depth of information it offers.
The term ‘Virtual Assistant’ might need reconsidering too as this is already in use to describe outsourced personal assistance in business.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
I agree that this is quite cool but not necessarily the best application of the technology. I already have geo-ware apps on my iPhone then quickly tell me local restaurants, bars, banks etc.; and if i want weather I’ll go to WeatherBug for the depth of information it offers.
The term ‘Virtual Assistant’ might need reconsidering too as this is already in use to describe outsourced personal assistance in business.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
I see my colleague Ian has already commented. This is an extremely interesting development; however I see a little touch of ‘application waiting for need’ here. I would NEVER besmirch developers for pushing the envelope because that is how innovation happens. I do struggle to see why I would use Siri at present however. The whole voice recognition/speech interface thing is something I tend to avoid as I find most of them struggle to understand English as spoken by the erm….English
and any search is limited by what is known to the searching algorithm and domain (ok, I know that is a statement of the bleeding obvious!)
Generally, I use Google or indeed WeCanDo.Biz to find stuff via my Blackberry if I am out and about and even then being highly aware that my replies will be limited to those who have bothered to create some kind of web footprint or those who are SEO-fiends whose purpose in life is high Google rankings. Either way, I will always miss out on something. There is a sound argument here for those who are not so web-savvy to get themselves noticed or face never being found but that is still an evolutionary step for many small businesses. It is no real surprise that many in the SME space STILL have no web-presence, apart from maybe the odd directory listing and consequently get overlooked. Tools such as Siri and others will drive a (relatively) small number of passionate users to a (relatively) small number of suppliers. No issue there BUT if I were funding Siri or any similar application, my question would be, ‘So I monetize this via the mass-market exactly how?’
Being a passionate believer in evolution, this will either evolve or die, find its niche and dominate or slowly shuffle off its mortal coil. I certainly hope that there is a place for this kind of emergent technology but when all is said and done, to me, it seems like a stepping stone to something else.
Chris Butler
COO, WeCanDo.BIZ
Is there any similar other mobile applications ?
Do one of them actually already exists ?
Hi,
application is wonderfull i want for me, I’m need…
8.5 Million Dollars of funding!? I hope that large backing won’t force us Virtual Assistants out of business!
All in all and impressive application for sure.
Yo quiero probarla!