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Meet Siri's Little Brother, Trapit

Posted by timothy on from the ai-always-knows-what-you-want dept.

waderoush writes "Virtually overnight, Siri, the personal assistant technology in Apple's new iPhone 4S, has brought state-of-the-art AI to the consumer mainstream. Well, it turns out there's more where that came from. Trapit, a second spinoff of SRI International's groundbreaking CALO project (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), is preparing for a public beta launch this fall. The Web-based news aggregator lets users set up persistent 'traps' or filters on specific topics. Over time, the traps learn to include more articles that match users' interests and exclude those that don't. Philosophically, it's the exact opposite of social-curation news apps like Flipboard or Pulse, since it uses adaptive learning and sense-making technologies to learn what users like, not what their friends like. 'Just as Siri is revolutionizing the human-computer interaction on the mobile device, Trapit will revolutionize Web search as we know it today,' the company asserts."

7 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Are you efing serious? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Google has already done voice for a long time and did Iris in 8 hours shortly after Isis came out and you're running this article? You really are an internet whore! :)

    1. Re:Are you efing serious? by jo_ham · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Google has had voice search for quite awhile now, and the rest of the functions are what would have happened if you hooked up a voice recognition program to a virtual assistant. Unless I'm really misunderstanding this is something I could get running on my Android phone easily.

      So, in the classic "Apple didnt do this first" troll rush that I knew would be the first few comments when I read the summary, *why* has no one "hooked up a voice recognition program to a virtual assistant" before now and pushed it as a new big feature?

      The summary is accurate - before the 4S, this stuff was around in Android and other phones (hell, even the 3GS had voice control similar to what Android has, just without the ability to go much beyond the set phrases), but who was really talking about it? Now, it's a big thing and I guarantee that it will be touted as a big feature of every coming smartphone if the usefulness of the feature outlasts the novelty.

      Just like "Apple didn't make the first mp3 player" and "Apple didn't make the first tablet" and "Apple didn't make the first home computer" they also "didn't make the first voice recognition assistant", but they were first to put it front and centre and refine it into something that can be very useful.

    2. Re:Are you efing serious? by hedwards · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, when you claim that something is revolutionary, you're claiming that they were in fact first. Just because you're a fan boy, doesn't mean that it's trolling to point out that Apple once again is getting to the party late and is trying to pretend like previous implementations don't exist.

      True to Apple's style, they're throwing a bunch of marketing money at people trying to convince them that Apple was first, when it's demonstrably not correct.

      On some level, I think you realize that it's not the case, you yourself admit that they just refined it into something useful. But, we already had useful implementations, I don't generally use them because voice recognition technology isn't really that useful in places where I want to use my phone. Sure at home I'm sure it works great, but when I'm out and about, I really don't want to be telling everybody around me what I'm doing.

  2. wonder how long by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    it will before I get sued by Apple. I'm an AI researcher.

  3. It's a trap! by w0mprat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Virtually overnight, Siri, the personal assistant technology in Apple's new iPhone 4S, has brought state-of-the-art AI to the consumer mainstream."

    I just choked on my cup of tea reading that. It's voice recognition feed into some search engines, Wolfram Alpha, Yelp and some snippets from Wikipedia and the result plays through text to speech, mashed up with voice commands. If you call such a remix of off-the-shelf tech and existing services state-of-the art AI then you must be joking. Indeed voice commands have been in many phones for a while, Android has had it, including dictation, since the dawn of the time. The only part about that is right is Apple's sucess at re-launching things that have been around for a while as something new, and actually getting people to use them. FaceTime for example, is mere video calling which many phones support, but nobody uses.

    What's worse is Apple probably managed to get a patent or two on Siri. It is so obvious that a bunch of coders at a hackathon could put something similar together in a few hours and have a demo of the same thing. Oh... wait... they've done exactly that, it's called Iris Alpha from a firm called, and it took eight hours.

    Point is, while Apple's idea is clever, the polish and packaging good and the marketing cleverest, but it is absolutely not start of the art artificial intelligence, it's the sorry state of artificial stupidity, and why we have little to fear in the way of robot uprisings yet.

    Give it a cute name and throw in some smart ass answers to inevitable cheeky questions and Apple has fooled a lot of people, clearly.

    --
    After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
    1. Re:It's a trap! by mrsquid0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How do you expect people who do not have real intelligence to recognize artificial intelligence?

      --
      Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
  4. Re:Siri is not "voice" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You do understand that it was an application before, right? Everything you say and do has already been done on earlier phones with appli... OH WAIT, they pulled it from the 3 / 3g / 4 store didn't they.

    Oh, my bad.

    Incidentally, this ( https://market.android.com/details?id=com.pannous.voice.actions.free ) application has been available on the Android Market since at least December. Check the video, it's remarkable similar.

    Again, nothing revolutionary that people haven't done before. They might have put in a few more cutesy preprogrammed remarks like Space Quest did back in the day of the command line, but if you're seriously going to pay another $800 for an application -- you need your head checked.