
Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late - planb
http://waxy.org/2011/10/apples_1987_knowledge_navigator_only_one_month_late/
======
breckinloggins
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.

~~~
jff
The great AI promise, huh? "True conversational AI is about 10-20 years away"
:)

~~~
ebiester
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.

~~~
dredmorbius
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.

For my kids, probably not so much.

~~~
jshort
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.

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ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
stevejohnson
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.

~~~
rbanffy
John Sculley. Yes, the one who fired Steve Jobs.

~~~
stevejohnson
Ah yes, of course. Sculley came to consider himself a visionary and artist,
sponsoring a couple of projects like these.

I'm not going to attribute the near-attainment of this lofty vision to the guy
he fired, but I'm glad it has been brought this far.

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rabble
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.

~~~
epaulson
When does it switch from the older video to the newer video? It looked to me
like all 5:45 was the same video.

~~~
Semiapies
Going by the comments there, I believe the blogger updated the video to one
with just the older clip, so as not to confuse people.

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ck2
Funny how someone mentioned this earlier today on HN and then someone manages
to repost it as another entry.

But I guess the video is somewhat well known and any voice recognition from
Apple will draw it's comparison.

Same video posted a year earlier with many more views
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8>

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.

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doomlaser
Except that Siri has been out on the App Store since 2010.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AohzWSkAU7c>

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.

~~~
Cushman
Wait, really? Apple's main product release is actually a product retraction?

Damn. They got some marketing _balls_.

~~~
m_eiman
More like a new set of system requirements…

~~~
Cushman
It's pretty rare on the user end that a forced upgrade necessitates a new
machine... It's like they're running a web app on your phone.

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fady
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!

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kinkora
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.

[1]<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8>

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mrich
Let's not forget that speech recognition has been baked into Android for at
least 2 years.

~~~
planb
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?

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larrywright
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.

~~~
ubercore
You weren't, really. The reality we have today is far removed from that video.
Like, really far removed.

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sp332
"maren" here on HN founded <http://zirtual.com/> , so you can get a real human
assistant while we wait for the future :)

~~~
primigenus
"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!

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raquo
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.

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speek
We took a lot of inspiration from this video over at Zazu
(<http://getzazu.com>), it's great to see this video being acknowledged by the
HN community!

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spiffistan
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.

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pennig
Behold, the power of OpenDoc!

~~~
coob
Xcode 4 really reminds me of OpenDoc, just for dev tools.

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civilian
Apple also predicted that moms will still be nagging in 2011! Astounding. :)

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shubhamgoel
insane

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joejohnson
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.

~~~
ljf
Nope def. 1987: [http://www.worldcat.org/title/educom-87-keynote-
address/oclc...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/educom-87-keynote-
address/oclc/027878535)

At which point in the video do they mention Yahoo? I watched it again and
couldn't hear it.

