When Apple unveiled its new global phone the iPhone 4S earlier this month, a very special ‘lady’ also turned up at the event – Siri. A brand new personal assistant service that started off as an app just a few months ago and has already evolved into a major new area of development within Apple…
Put quite simply, Siri is a way to speak to your iPhone and ask it to do stuff for you. It is, however, a lot more than a search engine focused on information retrieval – it’s more about doing than it is finding. As a result, its greatest distinguishing feature is that it applies context to questions which means Siri is able to work out what you mean – which is where most of the science comes in.
Users interact with Siri in a dialogue, as you would with a human assistant. This is easy to do since Siri behaves in an open-ended manner, understanding that a conversation evolves when you’re planning an event. For example, a user might request a booking at a restaurant for 7:30pm which Siri would execute based on location and the type of restaurant requested. If the user then asked to book a particular movie, Siri would choose the nearest movie theatre to the dinner booking, as well as a suitable time.
Siri’s greatest strength is its ability to plug into and cohesively orchestrate the web, as its processing of user requests does not happen on the phone but within the broader iCloud. This is a big departure from the current methodology where every app acts independently.
Siri is now pointing towards a future where APIs and apps work together as a collective to provide the best possible service for users. That’s the goal of Siri: to make the Internet work together to help you and wrap that up in a metaphor of a personal assistant who starts to get to know you and your preferences.
The original developers worked on it for more than two years and class Siri’s development as the largest artificial intelligence project ever, with a $200-million R&D budget.
Siri is, however, still very much in the beginning stages of its evolution and that’s for a very good reason: scale. Apple is rolling this out to millions of iPhone users around the world, because the 4S is Apple’s first “world phone.”
Fastcompany.com reports that while the original developers of the app were able to strike deals with many companies or utilize open-access APIs to get data on restaurants, events, news and so on, Apple now has to make this work across the world all at once.
As well as being a huge organisational and infrastructure-burdening task, which would almost certainly have consumed too much of Apple’s developer time, it would have likely been error-prone and would thus break Apple’s proudly held belief in delivering software that works.
The article states that unusually for Apple, the company chose to highlight Siri’s beta status. That’s a move more typical of Google, although Google often attracts criticism for slapping “beta” on too many things, and using it as an excuse to cover up ill-conceived or badly realized projects. In Apple’s case, it’s promised that Siri will get more clever.
This will mean an international expansion of the kind of uses Apple’s already showing for Siri in the U.S. alongside capabilities for understanding French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and who knows what else from Mandarin onward.
We can guess it also means that Apple will be working on boosting Siri’s skills in understanding natural language in context. We’ve heard that Siri’s team inside Apple is one of the biggest – and with that many brains working on what was an already impressive idea, Siri can only get better in time.
As Apple strikes international deals with data-providers both local to the user and as general web services, Siri will also begin to be able to cross-link requests for data in a cleverer way too (perhaps suggesting that a new book is coming out from an author you just asked for data on or bringing up a shopping page for you automatically).
If FindMyFriends takes off, Apple may even be able to integrate a degree of physical social networking to Siri too, such as suggesting to your pals nearby that you’re looking at a movie and perhaps they’d like to come with you. Similarly, FaceTime and Skype integration would let you quiz Siri about a fact or a meeting date, and then seamlessly chat to one of the meeting attendees – possibly data prompted by Siri itself.