Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant

Ever so often i see an iPhone application that makes me want to go off and buy one (i am still on Blackberry because it is the work standard). I have an iTouch in which i test and play with applications, etc. but since it requires wifi it is limited as to the universal use for applications.

I got to see the 2nd public demo of Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistance at the Semantic Technologies conference a couple weeks back that i have been mentioning to a lot of folks. I just found the slide deck that Tom Gruber used as well as the keynote video which is worth a view if you want to see what the future holds for us in regards to connected information retrieval and delivery.

During the presentation Tom Gruber outlines what it takes to put an application like the Siri Virtual Personal Assistant together and why the time is right for Siri and others. The enabling conditions that he outlines include: [@minute 6:49]

• Location Awareness
• Time Awareness
• Task Awareness
• Conversational Interface
• Speech to Text
• Text to Intent (natural language processing)
  
• Dialog Flow
• Semantic Data
• Services APIS
• Task & Domain Models
• Access to Personal Information (data portability)

Video demo starts at about 8 minutes:


Interested in learning more? See additional coverage of Siri.