Apple's Siri As Revolutionary As the Mac?

hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review is running an article on Siri, the speech recognition technology inside the new iPhone. They make the case that Siri's use of artificial intelligence and speech recognition is going to change the way we interact with machines. From the article: 'The advantage of using speech over other interaction paradigms is that we have honed its use over thousands of years. It is entirely natural for us to talk to one another. Talking is one of the first things we learn how to do as children. It's second nature for us to ask a colleague or a friend a question and for them to answer the same way. Being able to talk to a phone like it's a personal assistant is something that people are going to get very used to, very quickly. It's a much more natural approach than using a mouse on a desktop. And I highly doubt the impact is going to stop at phones.'"

Comments

Re:MIght as well be

[tumnasgt]

You had me until the second to last paragraph. Macs wouldn't evolve nearly as fast if there wasn't Windows (and to some extent, Linux) adding new stuff. With a lot of the cool things Apple do, they aren't the one to first do something, they are the first to do it in a way that appeals to the mainstream. Look at smartphones, Windows Mobile phones were around way before the iPhone, but they were never popular in the mainstream because they didn't have the "cool factor". And if it weren't for webOS and Android, iOS would quite possibly still have the crap notifications system that just got replaced with iOS 5.

So, yes, Apple are great at what they do, but to say that they would be where they are without the competition is ridiculous.

Re:MIght as well be

[somersault]

Actually, Linux computers are the closest thing to Linux you're going to get off the shelf. Netbooks, some Dells. Also if you order from PC builders you can easily get Linux out of the box with anything.

If you're really smart, you buy your 27" monitor separately rather than built into a computer that's going to be obsolete in a couple of years.