Putting aside the dated hardware (and hairstyles!), this technology is still a ways off. Yes, Siri is a good start, but it doesn't come anywhere near the type of conversational fluency and contextual awareness that the virtual assistant in this video does.
Honestly, I think we're still 10 or 20 years out from that.
We're frustratingly close on voice recognition, and I know people using computers for day to day dictation. The interesting thing is that the problem is training and practice, not algorithmic, and Google's wrapping that up now. (As far as I can tell, they're on the forefront of computational linguistics.)
We have the ability to parse out questions and return answers at the level of Jeopardy champions with Watson. Today, Watson would have been #113 on the supercomputer 500. In 2005, it would have been #3. #113 in 2005 was a cluster of 1024 Xeon 2.4Ghz.
I hate doing apples to oranges, but the only comparison I could find was from cpubenchmark.net, which puts the Xeon 2.5ghz as 381 on their propriatary PassMark. A $335 E3-1275 runs a 9,109 with 4 cores. That's back of the napkin 20-25 times faster. Let's go with 20, extrapolate and say within six years a n equivalent 64-processor machine would be sufficient for Watson-level performance, well within the range of an individual lab, with "good-enough" voice recognition!
The last piece here is conversational flow. Chatbots have demonstrated that we're nowhere near yet. That's algorithmic as much as anything, but it's a pretty big topic in computational linguistics, so I'm hoping we'll have that cracked soon.
Expert systems look to be reasonable in 5-10 years with fluency, with conversational AI not far behind. We know what we need. It's not an unknown problem at this point, for the most part.
A large part of Watson's performance on Jeopardy came from its buzzer timing.
Most human contestants (at the champion level) know the answers to most the questions. The gamesmanship, according to the all-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in a recent Fresh Air interview (Jennings returned to the show to take on Watson) is in the button press timing.
Watson has superb accuracy.
The computer actually knew the answers to fewer questions than the humans, but when Watson did know the answers, it always got the buzzer.
Helps to pull back the curtain a bit at times.
True AI and speech are hard. They're getting good. Scary good at times. There's an Android voice-to-voice translation app I've used to communicate with a Mandarin speaker (I manage just a few phrases). After doing that, I spent about fifteen minutes just staring at my phone and realizing that another huge piece of my future was now my present.
And I know the pieces behind it: voice recognition (cloud-assisted), translation, speech synthesis. But it's still mind-bogglingly cool. To me at least.
Yes, Watson had a major advantage at buzzing in but he was also capable of understanding or computing the questions. This is significant as the questions on Jeopardy aren't simply x + y = z but contain the complexities of the English language.
"True" AI is a misnomer, though, and is still far away, as we still don't know what we don't know. But conversational AI? The processing power will be there and we know where the algorithms need to improve, and we have ideas on how to do it.
My point was more that we know what's left. That hasn't been the case before the last five years or so.
Sorry for the off-topic, but you’ve seen that HAL INITIALIZATION FAILED is one of the error codes 2011 builds of Windows 8 spit out? http://cl.ly/3z3t360U203B2g303i3Y
That assistant looks like Bill Nye :-) I wonder if anyone showed this video as prior art in the iPad patent discussion.
Perhaps one of the most salient things to learn from this is that people with a vision, and a will, work continually toward that vision even when progress seems non-existent. A solid idea of what you'd like something to look like, elucidated clearly, can help shape products for years until what you imagine can be made real. When I saw Alan Kay talk about the Dynabook at one of Xerox PARC's lecture series I felt that here was a guy who had basically committed to this vision, and was knocking down objections one by one.
Ironically, this video was made at the request of one of the CEOs who was booted during Apple's dark period. (Gil Amelio? Edit: See child, it was John Sculley.)
Source: Insanely Great. I don't have a copy to look it up in.
The video is a mix of two different videos, one from 1987, and one from 1997. The CyberDog / OpenDoc stuff in the second half is obviously not from the 80's as those projects were created in 1996-1997.
What's interesting to me is how slow the UI obviously is - I guess they were trying to make it "realistic" for the time and therefore more believable than instantaneous (or it was a limitation of the software they used to create it). Reminds me of the "Lost in Space" movie where the UI from the future seemed too fast to them.
Until today that is. It's been artifically limited to Apple's forthcoming iPhone 4S, and current customers will have the service shut off for them on the 15th.
I hadn't heard anything about them removing the app from people who already have it. I will find it infuriating if an app I bought almost 2 years ago and still use is suddenly removed because of a marketing decision to tie it exclusively to a new product. It currently works on a 3GS and even on 3G with somewhat less functionality.
I got it right when it launched, and I remember it being a paid app. After posting that comment earlier, I checked it and the server is already down for me. I saw the post on TC that it will stay functional until 10/15 but mine currently isn't. Taking something away from
existing users to make new hardware more exclusive is super disappointing.
one of the best concepts i've seen from apple. yes, siri does not do all that, but, you certainly can manage most of it with all the apps available..nice find, nice find indeed!
They seem to have also invented the concept of "checking-in". See video[1] at 0:38 second mark onwards where he talks about a student checking in at Guatemala.
I really hope Siri is not so much about speech recognition but about "intention recognition". If something like "Text my wife that I'll be home at 8" really works without memorizing the exact phrase, then Siri is not just a voice interface, but indeed a personal assistant. I guess that's why Apple kept the name Siri - so the user thinks of "her" as a personality.
That said, I'm very skeptical - has Apple ever added a beta tag to a main features of new hardware?
I saw this on VHS when it originally came out, at an Apple user group meeting. I was 15 years old. I remember thinking at the time that it all seemed to far-fetched to become reality. I'm glad I was wrong.
"Your sensitive stuff is safe with us.
Whether it's your email address, or usernames or passwords, your dedicated Zirtual Assistant would rather fall on their sword than divulge any of your sensitive information to internet creepers!" Hmm. Creepy!
It's sad that we still did not achieve the level smoothness and interoperability imagined in this video. Who cares about talking to the computer. Getting things done is still a bunch of ugly hacks.
Regardless of the awkwardness of this, it's still incredibly fascinating to see. It's kind of like Google Wave meets FaceTime meets Siri and an Exahertz of AI.
That's nice and all but this video is not from 1987.. 1997 maybe. The lady at the beginning of the video mentions Yahoo which didn't launch until 1995.
Honestly, I think we're still 10 or 20 years out from that.