How This Guy Is Making Your iPhone Virtually Human [17Sep11] - 0 views
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Today, your iPhone is a gadget, a mere consumer appliance. But your future iPhone will become increasingly human. You’ll have conversations with it. The phone will make decisions, prioritize the information it presents to you, and take action on your behalf — rescheduling meetings, buying movie tickets, making reservations and much more.
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In short, your iPhone is evolving into a personal assistant that thinks, learns and acts. And it’s all happening sooner than you think,
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Ultimately, however, human beings are hard-wired to communicate with other people, not computers. And that’s why the direction of interface design is always heading for the creation of artificial humans.
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There are four elements to a machine that can function like a person: 1) speech; 2) decision-making algorithms; 3) data; and 4) “agency,” the ability to act in the world on your behalf.
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For speech, Apple has maintained a long-standing partnership with the leading company. A version of iOS 5 with Nuance Dictation has reportedly been sent out to carriers for testing.
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For decision-making algorithms, Apple can rely on the amazing technology it purchased in April, 2010, when it bought Siri, a company that created a personal-assistant application that you talk to, and it figures out what you want.
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The most expensive, ambitious and far-reaching attempt to create a virtual human assistant was initiated in 2003 by the Pentagon’s research arm, DARPA (the organization that brought us the Internet, GPS and other deadly weapons).
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The project was called CALO, for “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes,” and involved some 300 of the world’s top researchers.
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The man in charge of the whole project was a brilliant polymath who worked as senior scientist and co-director of the Computer Human Interaction Center at SRI, Adam Cheyer (pictured above).