Siri

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He didn’t call it a world-changing event, like Siri’s co-founder did in the days leading up to the iPhone 4S announcement. But it is pretty clear that he knows how profound Siri will be to smartphone users.

Woz on his last call with Jobs, the future of Apple and other big stuff below:

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LM7edH6ZpE]

We stumbled across this video on YouTube… and Siri clearly should not yet be used by non-native speakers of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, or Germany. As you can see in the video, the speaker is talking in English but with a foreign accent, and Siri does not understand one command. “Read dick”.

Update: Australian accent tested by Gizmodo AU below:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNsrl86inpo

When we interviewed Siri co-founder Norman Winarsky in the week before the Siri announcement, he said that Apple’s foray into ‘mainstreaming the Virtual Personal Assistant’ would be the next step in human interfaces. Keyboard, Mouse, Touch Screen, and now Voice. A World-Changing event.

Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I’d go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event. Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL will get things done and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift.

With some customers getting their hands on their iPhone 4S early, there are some early Siri walkthroughs hitting the net, below:

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The BBC has just posted their hands-on with Apple’s new iPhone 4S. While there isn’t much to show asthetically, BBC demos Apple’s new camera application and the hit of the show, the Siri personal assistant. You’ll notice how Siri actually repeats back to you what you say, and it works pretty seamless, even with a British accent.

Check out Apple’s Siri demo below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4D4kRbEdJw]
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On Tuesday, Apple will change the way humans interact with electronic devices. All over again.

Perhaps the biggest announcement at Apple’s iPhone event on Tuesday will be Assistant, Apple’s evolution of the Siri Personal Assistant Software. Siri, you’ll remember, is the company Apple picked up for a rumored $200 million in April of last year for, in Steve Jobs’ words, its “Artificial Intelligence”, not search or speech recognition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpjpVAB06O4]

During Siri’s brief two months on its own, it described itself as a ‘VPA’:

Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) represent the next generation interaction paradigm for the Internet. In today’s paradigm, we follow links on search results. With a VPA, we interact by having a conversation. We tell the assistant what we want to do, and it applies multiple services and information sources to help accomplish our task. Like a real assistant, a VPA is personal; it uses information about an individual’s preferences and interaction history to help solve specific tasks, and it gets better with experience.

Apple has long wanted to bring an Artificial Intelligence-based Personal Assistant to the masses. In the late 80’s, Apple made the Knowledge Navigator series of videos (example below) to showcase this ambition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8&start=30]

In the video, the professor mentions that someone wrote an article 5 years ago trashing Jill’s research (watch from 1:25 min onwards, at 1:50 min he mentions more details) – The computer says the doctor’s name and says his article in 2006 – which means the professor is in 2011. Ha! Thanks PBHK!

The world has come a long way since then, but as you’ll see on Tuesday, Apple had remarkable foresight way back in 1987.

We had the chance to speak to Siri’s co-founder and board member, Norman Winarsky…

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While we have independently been expecting the new iPhone to feature little exterior differences from the iPhone 4, there still has been some debate over the new iPhone’s design. Today, rumors of a re-design can essentially be put to rest. Inside the latest iTunes beta is a specific mention of the “iPhone 4S.” Along with the new iPhone name of “iPhone 4S” comes an image, and it is of a CDMA iPhone 4.

Unless Apple still has the CDMA iPhone 4 as a placeholder image until the new iPhone is announced, we’re fairly confident that the iPhone 4S will pack the CDMA iPhone design. iTunes only holds two iPhone 4S references: black and white versus the four iPhone 4 references of black/GSM, black/CDMA, white/GSM, and white/CDMA. This may also confirm the rumors of the new iPhone being a dual-mode/CDMA + GSM handset.

iPhone 4S confirmed as N94 (iPhone 4,1) that showed up in Apple’s inventory system:

The new iPhone will likely feature the dual-core A5 processor from the iPad 2, and eight megapixel camera, 1GB of RAM, Nuance-based speech-to-text Dictation, and the breakthrough Assistant feature based on Apple’s purchase of Siri. Everything you need to know can be read here.

Thanks, Ron!

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Update Sep 27 – Apple has sent “Let’s Talk, iPhone” ;) invites to the event.

It’s time to show our cards.

If you crack open the casing of the new iPhone, you will find significant upgrades from the iPhone 4. The new iPhone features Apple’s dual-core A5 processor like the iPad 2 for even faster performance, better gaming, and drastically improved graphics. Apple didn’t stop there though. Unlike the iPad 2, the new iPhone packs 1GB of RAM, according to a source familiar with the SOC’s manufacturing. That not only means better web browsing, but more importantly, new background tasks that Apple will introduce in the new iPhone’s software will perform much better.

The new iPhone will also feature an upgraded camera system. In terms of hardware, the new camera is an 8 megapixel sensor that takes incredibly high-resolution and clear shots, even in low light conditions because it has a backlit sensor. Also, panorama photography references have been found in the iOS SDK on multiple occasions which means we’ll likely see that feature. Other than that, the camera front-end system is reportedly mostly the same.

The new iPhone also contains Qualcomm Gobi Baseband chips that allow it to operate on both GSM and CDMA networks. We can’t yet confirm or deny the rumors that Apple was building a virtual SIM card system or if it has an NFC chip yet, however.

Although some may be happy with the new iPhone’s substantial internal hardware boosts, the new device’s biggest selling point is actually a software feature called Assistant. As we first revealed, Assistant is Apple’s Siri-inspired, system-wide voice navigation system. It so far appears that iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS users will be left out in the fun, unfortunately, because the feature requires the A5 CPU and additional RAM.

Everything you could possibly want to know about Assistant is after the break…

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpjpVAB06O4]

Apple’s purchase of Siri in early 2010 and their partnership with Nuance in 2011 has many hoping that Apple has something like speech-to-text or voice-navigation up its sleeve for iOS 5. One of the remaining advantages of Android over iOS is its system-wide Voice Actions technology.

Unfortunately, WWDC and the iOS 5 announcement came and went and nothing related to voice-navigation had been announced. Even so, the Apple-Nuance partnership has been confirmed by way of Nuance voices in Apple’s OS X Lion and Nuance speech-to-text functionality that is referenced in Apple’s internal settings modules.

But that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t hard at work at this very moment trying to cram some native OS level voice recognition technology into iOS 5 before launch.

Coupled with Nuance speech-to-text, Apple appears to be planning to take the fruit of their Siri purchase and fully integrate it into this fall’s release of iOS 5. Because these new features have yet to appear in iOS 5 on the iPhone 4 or iPhone 3GS, Apple might be saving these new features as an iPhone 5 exclusive. This would be akin to Apple’s decision to make Voice Control and video recording exclusive features to the iPhone 3GS, even though they could technically function on earlier models of the iPhone. As you can see in Siri’s promotional video above, the company advertises itself as “your virtual personal assistant.”

As you can see in the screenshot above from an Apple iPhone test unit, Apple is currently developing and testing a new iOS feature called “Assistant.” This screenshot, from a reliable source, is corroborated with our own SDK findings (below). The source did warn, though, that development is not yet completed – and just went into testing – and may not even be finished by the time the next iPhone ships.

More info after the break…

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