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iPhone 5 Keynote Predictions: Mainstreaming AI?

by IanMikutel on 10/4/11, 6:59 AM with 60 comments

• by Robin_Message on 10/4/11, 8:52 AM

  The demo isn't a virtual assistant. Its a glorified search engine with API integration and voice recognition.

  My vision of a virtual assistant is that you would be able to say: "Book dinner with Ross and David next week", and the only other interactions you have with the agent are "You're going to that Indian you and Ross like on Tuesday at 7" or "Can't be done, how about Monday the week after?", and possibly a message when you use your calendar "Trying to book David and Ross for dinner this evening" on some days the assistant has picked out. Meanwhile, Ross and David get e-mails that appear to be from you in address, tone and content, suggesting dates and places. If they have assistants too, maybe they don't see them; if they don't, then they can reply and the assistant understands them.

  That's the sort of thing a PA actually does; they don't Google the flights for you, they know your diary, your preferences and your needs and they book the right damn flight. Your phone should be saying "Walk out of your office at 2pm and get into the cab that'll be waiting. At the airport, walk to check-in desk 301 and hand me over. I'll take it from there."

  The predictions, especially with regard to leveraging data in Facebook sound closer, so I'm waiting eagerly.

• by revorad on 10/4/11, 8:13 AM

  Can anyone upvoting this please explain what objective information they got out of this post? All I read was marketing speak in bold and caps, with no new information on why people might actually use this.

  I'm obviously not doubting the potential, since I haven't seen the app yet, but this article is terribly low on substance.

• by cheald on 10/4/11, 8:13 AM

  I'll admit straight-up that I haven't looked at any of the Siri presentations, so I don't know what is and isn't possible with it, but the simple fact of the matter is that AI like it's being pitched ("reasoning", ever-learning, fast and flexible to respond to natural language input) takes an obscene amount of RAM, computing power, and persistent storage to be any good. There's not a chance that this is going to be an inherent feature of the iPhone 5 - it might be a "cloud" feature that the iPhone uses, but if it's as good as the rumormongers are making it out to be, we're talking datacenters worth of hardware, not one phone's worth.

  It'll be interesting to see what's actually announced, but I'm having a really hard time swallowing the idea that Apple's putting a Star Trek AI on a phone.

• by Kylekramer on 10/4/11, 8:25 AM

  A lot of pie in the sky speculation based off a three year old talk there. Especially since I am sure an Apple acquisition wasn't on the road map at the time. But my answers to his questions would be:

  * Will Assistant be world-changing?*

  No. But it will probably be a damn good feature.

  Will it address foreign languages/cultures

  Probably, since Nuance can do a fairly impressive number of languages and all signs is Apple is partnering with them.

  relationship questions

  No. God no.

  open task API

  Maybe, but I would be a little surprised.

  payments

  Now we are just throwing buzz words together. Want to know why the "speech to text world" is "untapped"? Cause it is made up. Plus it would essentially be either a search ad or affiliate marketing situation, neither of which seem very Apple-like.

  Facebook social knowledge

  Again, doubtful. I mean, they've gone out of their way to integrate Twitter in iOS 5, which reeks of Facebook and Apple not coming to terms. But maybe they banged out a last minute deal.

  I am sure Assistant be like most Apple features. Fairly impressive, a bit more detail oriented than the competition, but ultimately not that much better. If anything, I think it will be the new Facetime. Good demo, good for ads, some people will use it a bunch, but mostly a showy feature that will get used once and then ignored by the vast majority of users.

• by vga15 on 10/4/11, 12:52 PM

  I wouldn't be so sure about state-of-the-art natural lang processing & speech recognition systems being good enough, for Apple (given their track record) to pitch a complete virtual assistant as a software service (VAAS?).

  The ideal AI assistant would be entangled with copious amounts of machine learning algorithms. And it'd have to be plugged into my email, sms's, phone convos, facebook, twitter etc. The AI would have to evolve not just from my experiences, but the collective experiences of the ecosystem (privacy alert!).

  There's way too many dangling variables here -- privacy implications, govt. regulation, software error (30%+ for state of the art natural language processing) etc.

  Yet, I've gotta say I'm stupidly giddy about today's keynote.

• by 6ren on 10/4/11, 11:24 AM

  > So its an architecture thats end-to-end that handles natural language modeling all the way through the service flows in a declarative way.

  Can anyone elaborate on this?

• by neebz on 10/4/11, 8:16 AM

  What I find hard to understand is that Google who has been working on the voice recognition for ages and has actual products out there and enormous data, still struggles with quality in this area. How can everyone put so much trust on Siri that it would change the paradigm when it's hardly tested in the market.

  In my opinion it all stems from the trust on Apple. Apple has the reputation that they don't ship half-products and with the rumours going strong that Siri would be part of iPhone 5, everybody is simply jumping on the bandwagon and _assuming_ that Apple has solved the voice recognition problem.

  As much as awesome Apple is, I still find it hard to believe that they have figured out voice-recognition.

• by newhouseb on 10/4/11, 8:16 AM

  Siri has been out on the iPhone for at least a year and while impressive, I don't believe qualifies as game-changing (it couldn't, for example, tell me what the average velocity of an unladen swallow was). I'm wondering if there've been any breakthrough(s) after they were acquired?

• by monochromatic on 10/4/11, 2:23 PM

  > 2. Will Assistant handle the "Should I dump my boyfriend or girlfriend" question?

  Well, if your boyfriend/girlfriend also has an iphone, this service might well be privy to some information that would be relevant to this question...

• by room606 on 10/4/11, 8:24 AM

  There's a demo of Siri in the linked Vimeo presentation that starts around 8:00. It's pretty impressive

  http://vimeo.com/5424527

• by sp332 on 10/4/11, 3:28 PM

  Get yourself a real human assistant from this startup: http://zirtual.com/ (founded by "maren" here on HN)

• by hupa on 10/4/11, 8:20 AM

  I just can't see how this would be anything other than very annoying to use. It would have to work flawlessly to not be.

• by jimbobimbo on 10/4/11, 2:01 PM

  iPhone 5 Keynote Predictions: Unicorns and Ponies. Scoop 100%!

• by marze on 10/4/11, 2:09 PM

  Typing on tiny keyboards is so early 21st century.

• by zephjc on 10/4/11, 6:46 PM

  Well, I guess this didn't happen.

• by juiceandjuice on 10/4/11, 9:14 AM

  Sounds like Dr. Smile