Siri Ushers in The Age of Artificial Intelligence

As covered in a previous article, Apple has just released the iPhone 4S. Despite the fact that it features a faster processor, better camera, and it being a world phone, the real significant change is that it’s the first real attempt to bring artificial intelligence to the average “Joe.” These “personal assistants” on smart phones (expect an Android and Windows version of Siri to appear) will become commonplace and soon enough will be ubiquitous.

Interestingly enough Intel Corporation’s, Justin Rattner, in 2010, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco described how we would interact with these “personal assistants.” Rattner calls them, “ultra-smartphones” that offer “context-aware” computing. He said at IDF 2010; “Imagine a device that uses a variety of sensory modalities to determine what you are doing at an instant, from being asleep in your bed to being out for a run with a friend.” “Future devices will constantly learn about who you are, how you live, work and play.”

According to Wired, “Apple seems to be wisely keeping the feature (Siri) firmly in the “beta” stage even as it seeks to popularize talking to your cell phone to get things done.” The co-founder of Siri, Norman Winarsky, said that the original Siri app which was released in 2010 for the iPhone 3GS required a lot of “work-arounds” because of the lack of computing power available on it. The iPhone 3GS had a 600MHZ processor. Even though this is Siri’s first general release Apple is still calling Siri a “beta” stage product. The iPhone 4S in comparison to the iPhone 3GS, has a dual-core processor.

Now lets examine the future of Siri. In my SoC map I laid out in, “The Road to the Post-PC Era“, artificial intelligence will reach IBM Deep Blue processing power by the year 2018. If your not familiar with IBM’s Deep Blue, it was the first computer to win a chess game against a reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, under standard playing time in 1997.

This means that within 7 years we’re going to be able to have a super computer in our pockets! Four years after that computing will match the level of IBM’s Watson, in the year 2021. IBM Watson was the super computer that played on Jeopardy earlier this year and  beat Brad Rutter, the biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, and Ken Jennings, the record holder for the longest championship streak (75 days).

Now courtesy of Mac World let’s look at the current state of artificial intelligence, in the video below, with their review of Siri on the iPhone 4S.