Two organizations key to Apple’s history are to be merged into one, as Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has been donated to SRI International. This will see PARC and SRI research teams working together on future projects.
PARC was where Steve Jobs famously saw the graphical user interface and mouse that were used in the LISA and then Macintosh, while SRI was where Siri was developed …
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SRI International, the team behind the technology that later became Apple’s Siri voice assistant feature in iOS, today announced a new product that it says “aims to improve the consumer experience on mobile devices through intelligent conversation.” Kasisto will be a similar intelligent voice assistant but the company will open it up to business customers to integrate into their own apps:
“Virtual personal assistant technology has revolutionized consumer interaction with mobile devices,” said Norman Winarsky, Ph.D., vice president, SRI Ventures. “Now consumers expect a more human-like experience when interacting online. Kasisto represents a new user experience—one that is context aware, personalized, and more effective.”
The company says Kasisto will allow businesses to integrate the virtual personal assistant features into mobile apps in days or weeks intend of months while greatly decreasing the costs currently associated with similar technologies. “It is context-aware and provides text, touch, and speech modalities, and natural language understanding and reasoning. The platform also includes a powerful software development kit (SDK) for easy customization and integration into existing mobile applications.
You can learn more about Kasisto at the company’s website.
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]
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…
