

iPhone 5 Keynote Predictions: Mainstreaming AI? - IanMikutel
https://plus.google.com/111121259089480098657/posts/NGvHrVZdtg1

======
Robin_Message
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.

~~~
Geee
I'm waiting for the day when young people are non-functional in real world
without their virtual assistants. :)

~~~
spiralganglion
I'm waiting for the day when I can focus on more interesting problems than
reserving hotel rooms in 10 cities, going back and forth with booking agents
trying to figure out when I need to be in each city, or having to micromanage
the fluctuating schedules of my band just to organize a rehearsal.

I'd rather be playing music.

~~~
bambax
But what is to keep the virtual assistant from playing music in your stead?

Doesn't get tired, doesn't get drunk, doesn't ask for money...

~~~
JonnieCache
Lots of people currently tour the world performing music that is partly
algorithmic, where aspects of the performance are determined by (usually
simple) AI algorithms. This is normal. The crowd doesn't know, and those that
do know think it's cool.

When we get to the point where AI can make good music on its own without
direction, we will have a lot bigger questions to worry about than the fate of
musicians. It won't be a pressing issue.

~~~
LiveTheDream
Can you expand on this? Are you referring to something more complex than
lights that flash with the beat of the music?

------
revorad
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.

~~~
IanMikutel
I wrote the post, so I should probably answer you. :)

Honestly, after watching the 45 minute presentation, there were a ton of
interesting tid bits I transcribed word for word (that's what you see in all
the quotes and the video is embedded if you prefer that).

For skimming purposes, I tried to bold the most important bits in the quotes,
so it was straight from Siri's Co-Founder, CTO and VP of Design, Tom Gruber's
mouth.

Honestly, skimming through the article quickly myself (it took me 3 hours
total to write including watching the 45 minute keynote and transcribing the
important bits) I can't see how you think it is low on substance, because
there is a ton of it in there.

I'm honestly fascinated to see if Apple open's up the Assistant API to 3rd
party developers as the Siri team clearly planned to pre-acquisition. In my
mind it makes a lot of sense given the new "verb" world Facebook introduced,
and I think developers would have a ball with it.

~~~
revorad
I don't mean to belittle anyone's achievements, but this is what I got from
the bold parts of your article:

The technology came out of a government funded project on which hundreds of
people worked.

It's iterations ahead of the market and so it's real AI with real use.

It will be useful to most people most of the time.

It can't understand languages other than English.

It can't answer relationship questions.

It may have an open API, in the future.

It may allow you to pay for things, in the future.

It may use social data, in the future.

I guess I'll just wait for the actual release to see why and how this is
world-changing. If the product is truly world-changing, I don't think anyone
can do justice to it with a blog post. Imagine if people tried to explain
Google the search engine like this.

~~~
IanMikutel
My goal with this post was simply to raise interesting questions based on what
the Siri team saw as the future of the product back in 2008, so it could frame
all of our discussion and analysis when you watch the keynote with Apple
tomorrow.

I think it will be fascinating to see what, if any, of these questions Apple
has decided was worth tackling since they acquired the product, and which in
the eyes of Jobs, were important and useful enough for the masses.

It's going to be a fun keynote tomorrow.

~~~
revorad
It will certainly be fascinating. I'm just amused that you're so fascinated
before the questions have been answered :-)

The problem with voice recognition apps is that Google has taught us to get,
literally, instant results. Waiting even a second seems way too slow now.
That's a very high bar to live up to.

~~~
IanMikutel
On desktops, maybe. But on mobile devices, Google is just as slow as your
connection.

Imagine if Apple built in some Amazon Silk-like ties between Assistant and
iCloud? Or if they do some local caching or if Sprint really does have this
exclusively and its on 4G?

~~~
revorad
If I have a slow connection, it'll be equally slow regardless of the app. So
the speed comparison is on top of that.

Amazon Silk-like technology may make sense for ecommerce content (yet to be
seen), but it doesn't make sense for complex search queries. The longest time
is probably spent in understanding the query and ranking results, not in
downloading the content of the results. For the same reason, local caching
makes no sense, except for some personal data, which Google also has access to
(openly or secretly).

------
cheald
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.

~~~
IanMikutel
Norman Winarsky, the man who put together the original Siri team, was asked
what kind of power the Siri AI takes and if it could have delayed the iPhone
today on 9to5mac.com, saying:

Norm: I’m not familiar with Apple’s roadmap and any delays but I can say that
AI takes a lot of computing power. The Siri software needs to cache data,
needs to access a big dataset at wide bandwidth and needs a big processor to
crunch all of the numbers. When we originally released Siri for the iPhone
3GS, we had to perform all kinds of optimizations and shortcuts to get it to
work efficiently. All I can say is that it will likely run much better on a
faster phone. (Source: [http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/03/co-founder-of-siri-
assistant-i...](http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/03/co-founder-of-siri-assistant-is-
a-world-changing-event-interview/))

There is a big jump in performance from 3GS to even iPhone 4, let alone iPhone
5 with possible A5 processor (dual core), 1GB RAM, iOS optimization, cloud
performance, and network performance--and that's not even considering if the
Sprint iPhone 5 exclusive is true which would mean the device runs on a 4G
network that would make this type of interaction even more interesting if
interacting with the cloud in some way.

~~~
BrainScraps
I'm with you -

This could be why it would be available only on the newest, 4G-enabled iPhone.
If this was all handled in the cloud and delivered at 4G speeds, it could be
compelling.

~~~
IanMikutel
And you could totally see Apple pitching this to AT&T and Verizon and they're
going "Crap, people already hate our data caps, and we already hate all the
data iPhones use..." and then Sprint's CEO Dan Hesse comes running over to
Jobs "Steve! We'd LOVE to handle that! We can do it! I swear, trust me. We
have 4G! It's blazing fast...give us a shot...please?" Hands over $20.5
billion dollars...

Source: [http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/03/sprint-guarantees-to-buy-
over-...](http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/03/sprint-guarantees-to-buy-
over-20-billion-in-iphones-from-apple-launching-the-iphone-5-exclusively/)

------
Kylekramer
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.

~~~
IanMikutel
Thanks for the analysis on my analysis. :)

I can definitely see why you'd think this could go the way of Facetime, but
its completely different. Why? Because while Facetime seemed to solve a
problem we all wanted solved, in reality its simply not practical to video
call someone with a mobile phone a lot of the time. If I'm on the go, walking
a city or driving in the suburbs, Facetime is a terrible idea.

Assistant is exactly the opposite. It's almost essential in those situations
and extremely practical. I can pretty much see Oprah endorsing this feature
alone in her anti-texting-while-driving campaign now.

And YOU get an iPhone Assistant, and YOU get an iPhone Assistant...

~~~
cheald
The voice recognition on my Android phone is marvelously useful while driving;
I hold my search button, say "navigate to Schlotzsky's", and it pops up a map,
finds the nearest Schlotzsky's, plots directions to it, and I'm off. No hunt-
and-pecking on a keyboard without tactile feedback, no navigating through
twelve menus or trying to remember how to spell "Schlotzsky's". It's an
awesome feature, and it's something that the iPhone needs to at least match.

What's Apple going to do beyond that, though? They can't build a keynote on
"Hey, now we have this feature that our competitor has". It has to be
something bigger and better. Android exposes speech input backed by Google's
unfathomable processing power and recognition dataset to every application
that wants to use it; what can Apple put on a phone that will be significant
enough to not be a "me too"?

------
vga15
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.

------
6ren
> 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?

------
neebz
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.

~~~
IanMikutel
Actually Siri is based off arguably more time, research and possibly funding
than Google may have thrown at this particular problem.

As I quoted from 9to5mac in my post:

"In 2003, the US Government began the most ambitious Artificial Intelligence
program in its history called the “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and
Organizes” or CALO program. The name was inspired by the Latin word “calonis”,
which means “soldier’s servant”. Funded by DARPA as part of its Personal
Assistant that Learns project, the program ran for five years and brought
together more than 300 researchers from 25 of the top university and
commercial research institutions, with the goal of “building a new generation
of cognitive assistants that can reason, learn from experience, be told what
to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond
robustly to surprise.

The program was coordinated through SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. As
the program ended in 2007, SRI took the knowledge gained by the CALO and some
of its key players and formed Siri."

------
newhouseb
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?

~~~
IanMikutel
The talk is that they have deeply integrated Wolfram Alpha to automatically
pull and handle queries like the one you mentioned.

Source:
[http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/30/mockups_demons...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/30/mockups_demonstrate_apples_anticipated_iphone_5_assistant_feature.html)

~~~
BrainScraps
I knew Wolfram would be involved with handling these queries - especially when
that demo had the "How many calories are in a banana?" line !

------
monochromatic
> 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...

------
room606
There's a demo of Siri in the linked Vimeo presentation that starts around
8:00. It's pretty impressive

<http://vimeo.com/5424527>

------
sp332
Get yourself a real human assistant from this startup: <http://zirtual.com/>
(founded by "maren" here on HN)

------
hupa
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.

~~~
IanMikutel
I feel like you could have made the same statement about the CRAZY idea of a
touchscreen smart phone back in 2007...and then Steve Jobs showed off the
iPhone and everyone went...well I guess that does work flawlessly.

Not trying to sound like a fanboy, but simply saying I think Apple's recent
track record has proven they're pretty good at releasing products that work
flawlessly.

Heck, this could have been the simple reason Siri (now Assistant) was acquired
way back in 2008 and is only now coming to light in an iPhone. Jobs may have
simply held it back to meet your expectations of him.

~~~
hupa
Straw Man argument, fanboy.

I thought that Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010.

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

------
marze
Typing on tiny keyboards is so early 21st century.

------
zephjc
Well, I guess this didn't happen.

~~~
zephjc
Never mind, I guess I just missed in the Engadget stream. Shame on me!

------
juiceandjuice
Sounds like Dr. Smile

