Apple’s Siri loses a lot in translation. Could human-powered intelligence pick up the slack where virtual assistants fail?
SRI International, the brains behind Apple’s Siri, has launched a dozen consumer products since its digital assistant got famous. We venture inside SRI’s labs to find out why you haven’t you heard of any of them.
Years before the Apple-loving world met Siri in 2010, Norman Winarsky was playing with SRI International’s then prototype virtual personal assistant among fellow passengers on board a delayed flight.
“I was sitting on the plane waiting for the flight to take off, and I asked Siri, ‘How long will flight 927 be delayed?’ And Siri came back to me and said the flight would be delayed 15 minutes,” recalls Winarsky, who was the SRI executive on the spin-off company’s board before it was sold to Apple. “The guy next to me looked at me and said ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that … why are you in coach?’”
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Is Siri a novelty or are you using it on a daily basis?
Everyone’s talking about the new iPhone 4S, which is officially due to arrive in consumers’ hands on Friday. But what are people really saying? Let’s take a look at what words truly dominate all of the major reviews so far.
Back in February 2010, Fast Company was wowed by a neat little iPhone app called Siri. “As you can see, using Siri is a lot like talking to a really, really well-informed friend,” Dan Macsai wrote in a post, which we’ve dug up here. In April 2010, Apple bought Siri. Today, Tim Cook reintroduced Siri as a primary addition to iOS 5. Turns out what wowed us then is what wowed Apple watchers today, too.
