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Apple accurately predicted Siri 24 years ago
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Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Toronto
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Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late
Wow, that's creepy. As the article says:
Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor's calendar is September 16, and he's looking for a 2006 paper written "about five years ago," setting the year as 2011.
And this morning, at the iPhone keynote, Apple announced Siri, a natural language-based voice assistant, would be built into iOS 5 and a core part of the new iPhone 4S.
So, 24 years ago, Apple predicted a complex natural-language voice assistant built into a touchscreen Apple device, and was less than a month off.
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: UK
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Wow. If only they'd gone to the bookies.
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I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
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The voice recognition in that video looks like it has more in common with the Enterprise's computer than with Siri.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
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It's a pretty awesome coincidence (or part of a master plan?) that voice driven technology from Apple is finally ready for prime time very near to the projected timeline of that video. Of course Charles is right that the AI and voice recognition of Knowledge Navigator is far more advanced than Siri, but it's still quite neat. One also notes that Knowledge Navigator seems to be a folding tablet. I wonder how long before Siri comes to the iPad.
Too bad though that Siri's voice sounds almost identical to MacInTalk/PlainTalk that has existed since System 7. One would have imagined that the state of the art in computing voice synthesis quality would have progressed substantially in 20 years, but that doesn't seem to be the case (although the Wikipedia article on the topic claims OS X has introduced substantially improved voices).
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
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I don't really think it's that amazing a prediction. People have been fantasizing about computers that could talk to you in plain English for years — the original Star Trek series back in the 60s even had this. It's also not that far-out of a technological concept — speech recognition software products have existed in some form for the Mac and PC for decades now, and Android has had something sort of like Siri for a while too.
It's a nice feature, for sure, but not anything too surprising, IMO.
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