Siri,Quora, And The Future Of Search [16Oct11] - 0 views
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Well now that Apple has gone and integrated the most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer market into its iPhone 4S, I thought it was time to brush some dirt off of Quora’s shoulder and shine a light on what the future of the company could hold.
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Quora’s founders and their first hire—designer Rebekah Cox—created the core of the most impressive “subjective knowledge extraction” machine ever constructed.
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By combining an answer voting mechanism and a reward addiction loop (upvotes are crack) with a strict identity requirement and a one-to-many follower model, Quora started solving the problem of extracting high-quality experiential knowledge out of humanity’s collective head and getting it into structured form on the internet. What’s more, Quora is also using humanity’s collective wisdom to rank it.
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Siri is a game-changing technology: The thing knows how to translate the garble of human language into targeted API calls that subsequently pull out the correct information from a potentially ever-expanding set of databases (assuming that Apple one day integrates other databases into Siri, which I’m confident it will). The main thing standing between Siri and the best answer for our likely questions is that the database that contains these answers is still a work in progress.