Bianca Bosker, at Huffington Post, delves into Siri’s origin. She reports that the intelligent virtual assistant was born out of the largest artificial intelligence research project in the country. It is also suggested that Apple has stunted Siri’s potential, but the future holds something different for it:
Siri’s backers know Apple’s version of the assistant has not yet lived up to its potential. “The Siri team saw the future, defined the future and built the first working version of the future,” says Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, one of the two first venture capital firms to invest in Siri. “So it’s disappointing to those of us that were part of the original team to see how slowly that’s progressed out of the acquired company into the marketplace.”
But as a new wave of virtual assistants compete to take on our to-do lists, Apple is under growing pressure to use the technology it already has and turn Siri into the multitasking, proactive helper it once was. Siri’s history suggests a fantastical future of virtual assistants is coming; where we now see Siri as a footnote to the iPhone’s legacy, some day soon the iPhone may be remembered as a footnote to Siri.
“A kinder, gentler HAL is on way its way to the mainstream for sure,” says Kittlaus. “Siri is just a poster child, but it goes way, way beyond that.”
This is an in-depth, well-researched piece that deserves a good chunk of time to be read.
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