Sorry, timeline doesn't work. The Prada was first announced on December 12, 2006. Apple announced and showed a working iPhone in January, 2007. According to Steve, iPhone had been in development for three years.
And we have one phone here, vs. the Blackberries, Palms, Windows CE, and other "smart" phones everyone else was shipping at the time.
The innovation was in combining all of those elements, and more. But one has only to look at the early Android phone announcements to see the 180-degree spin Google and the Android team did upon learning of the iPhone.
Early Android prototypes looked almost exactly like Blackberry ripoffs. Later versions looked like the iPhone.
Xerox gave Apple a three-day pass to PARC in exchange for the rights to buy $1,000,000 worth of pre-IPO Apple stock. What was then the hottest tech IPO of all time.
"The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product.[6] Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because the presiding judge dismissed most of Xerox's complaints as being inappropriate for a variety of legal reasons.
"Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I’d go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event. Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go."
"Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies... "
"This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL will get things done and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift."
"... certainly more advanced than just remembering a connection between two pieces of data that..."
Your teachers told you to remember?
And just for your information, "mom" doesn't have email, lives in another state, and has remarried and has a different name. That would have to be one heck of an observant AI....
"What does Siri do that a chatterbot can't? Nothing!"
I just told Siri to remind me next week to drain the sprinkler system. Find me a chatterbot that will do that. (grin)
(BTW, ALICE said, "Try putting that in a more specific context.")
"Neural net? Nope! (No ANN, no genetic algorithms, nothing.)"
You, sir, are an idiot. You use those things to help TRAIN AI-based systems. You can then have it continue to "learn", or you can freeze the net once you've determined it's behaving as expected or if it's reached its goals.
In the case of Siri, the current system is frozen, although certain behaviors can reach out for more information (weather, etc.) or store additional personal information (relationships). It's also, most certainly, recording the requests being made of it for future expansion of the system.
Hey, you say it's nothing more than a chatterbot, and if that fits your preconceived notions of the world, that's fine. But Apple says it's AI, DARPA says it's AI, the founders of Siri, the company, say it's AI.
Who to believe... them... or a disgruntled Slash-toll... hmmmm.
"If Siri had done that without you telling her, it could tenuously be construed as "learning". "
Bending over backwards there, aren't we? And just, how, pray tell, would Siri "learn" who my mom is without any input whatsoever? Hell, without more information, YOU couldn't do it, and I bet you consider yourself to be "intelligent." (grin)
Where the **** did you EXPECT it to add it? Stick in a quantum dot or spread it across holographic storage?
"... which gets erased."
You add information to bunch of neurons in your brain. If I zap those, I'd expect that information to be erased too. If I delete all or part of the data store for a neural net, I'd expect it to forget a few things too.
"Do you know anything at all about AI?"
Yes, as a matter of fact. Your contact list, your calendar, your location, your music, the current time, those are Siri's world, part of the knowledge base she uses to service your requests. So of course, it's going to store information about YOUR relationships in YOUR database. Duh.
Or to put it in other words, it's a service-based NLP neural net with your personal information as a significant portion the data store.
And that's it's job. To service requests and (currently) act as a limited personal assistant. It's not a simple chatterbot. It's not even a complex chatterbot.
I've got to believe you're now arguing just to be arguing. Did you not even READ the articles you posted?
To quote, "You tell Siri to remember that your Father is John Appleseed, she acknowledges your request. Siri remembers your relations by adding their name to your contact info in a section called relations. But the Exchange Sync protocol does not support these “custom” fields so when the phone tries to sync with the server this info gets lost."
I told Siri to text my mom. Siri asked who my mom was. I told her. Siri recorded that information and relationship in the contact database. Next time I said, "Send a text to my mom," Siri did.
Kind of missing the point. Siri is about convenience.
For example, I could swipe to unlock my phone, find the clock app, open it, switch to the Timer, change the hours and minutes to one hour, then click start. Or I could say, "Wake me in an hour."
Or I could unlock my phone, find the weather app and open it, switch to Denver, and scroll down to Sat and Sun... or I could say, "What's the weather this weekend in Denver?"
Or I could again unlock my phone, find the message app and open it, switch out of my work thread, find my girlfriend's thread, switch to it, start typing, and then hit send... or I could say, "Tell Peggy I'm going to be 10 minutes late."
And the stuff like, "Remind me to call my mom when I get home?" How many taps, strokes, and typing is it going to take to set that up manually?
Every single one of those actions can be done quicker and easier with Siri. And true, there may be some places where typing is "better", in that's it's more private or more unobtrusive, but that's not true all of the time.
They built voice input into the keyboard, so any app that's expecting text to be typed into a field can do voice. From what I've seen, there's no API access, however.
You might look up the definitions and differences between "weak" AI and "strong" AI. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Siri uses weak AI to perform NLP and command recognition. It's true that Siri only knows how to do the things it's been told how to do, but it's still a version of AI.
"From what we've seen so far, it can't as it has no facility for "learning"."
You mean, since last Friday?
Did you look up the reference to CALO?
"CALO was an Artificial Intelligence project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)[1] under its Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program. Its five-year contract brought together 300+ researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions, with the goal of building a new generation of cognitive assistants that can reason [NOTE], learn from experience [NOTE], be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise."
Reason and learn. It's weak AI, aimed primarily at NLP and command recognition, but it's far, far more than a mere chatterbot that's been hardwired to recognize a few keywords.
As stated above, AT&T announced that they sold 200,000 in the first 12 hours... all by themselves.
Read that again. AT&T, alone, without Apple stores, Apple Online, Verizon, Sprint, Best Buy, or Radio Shack sold more iPhone 4Ss in 12 hours than most phones sell in their first week.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, timeline doesn't work. The Prada was first announced on December 12, 2006. Apple announced and showed a working iPhone in January, 2007. According to Steve, iPhone had been in development for three years.
And we have one phone here, vs. the Blackberries, Palms, Windows CE, and other "smart" phones everyone else was shipping at the time.
The innovation was in combining all of those elements, and more. But one has only to look at the early Android phone announcements to see the 180-degree spin Google and the Android team did upon learning of the iPhone.
Early Android prototypes looked almost exactly like Blackberry ripoffs. Later versions looked like the iPhone.
Even Samsung would be proud...
Xerox gave Apple a three-day pass to PARC in exchange for the rights to buy $1,000,000 worth of pre-IPO Apple stock. What was then the hottest tech IPO of all time.
For that, you could "borrow" from me any day...
Fairly well known bit of computer history...
"The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product.[6] Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because the presiding judge dismissed most of Xerox's complaints as being inappropriate for a variety of legal reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)
More here...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
From SRI's Norman Winarsky...
"Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I’d go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event. Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go."
"Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies... "
"This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL will get things done and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift."
'Nuff said.
"... certainly more advanced than just remembering a connection between two pieces of data that..."
Your teachers told you to remember?
And just for your information, "mom" doesn't have email, lives in another state, and has remarried and has a different name. That would have to be one heck of an observant AI....
"What does Siri do that a chatterbot can't? Nothing!"
I just told Siri to remind me next week to drain the sprinkler system. Find me a chatterbot that will do that. (grin)
(BTW, ALICE said, "Try putting that in a more specific context.")
"Neural net? Nope! (No ANN, no genetic algorithms, nothing.)"
You, sir, are an idiot. You use those things to help TRAIN AI-based systems. You can then have it continue to "learn", or you can freeze the net once you've determined it's behaving as expected or if it's reached its goals.
In the case of Siri, the current system is frozen, although certain behaviors can reach out for more information (weather, etc.) or store additional personal information (relationships). It's also, most certainly, recording the requests being made of it for future expansion of the system.
Hey, you say it's nothing more than a chatterbot, and if that fits your preconceived notions of the world, that's fine. But Apple says it's AI, DARPA says it's AI, the founders of Siri, the company, say it's AI.
Who to believe... them... or a disgruntled Slash-toll... hmmmm.
"If Siri had done that without you telling her, it could tenuously be construed as "learning". "
Bending over backwards there, aren't we? And just, how, pray tell, would Siri "learn" who my mom is without any input whatsoever? Hell, without more information, YOU couldn't do it, and I bet you consider yourself to be "intelligent." (grin)
"No, it added that to a database..."
Where the **** did you EXPECT it to add it? Stick in a quantum dot or spread it across holographic storage?
"... which gets erased."
You add information to bunch of neurons in your brain. If I zap those, I'd expect that information to be erased too. If I delete all or part of the data store for a neural net, I'd expect it to forget a few things too.
"Do you know anything at all about AI?"
Yes, as a matter of fact. Your contact list, your calendar, your location, your music, the current time, those are Siri's world, part of the knowledge base she uses to service your requests. So of course, it's going to store information about YOUR relationships in YOUR database. Duh.
Or to put it in other words, it's a service-based NLP neural net with your personal information as a significant portion the data store.
And that's it's job. To service requests and (currently) act as a limited personal assistant. It's not a simple chatterbot. It's not even a complex chatterbot.
I've got to believe you're now arguing just to be arguing. Did you not even READ the articles you posted?
To quote, "You tell Siri to remember that your Father is John Appleseed, she acknowledges your request. Siri remembers your relations by adding their name to your contact info in a section called relations. But the Exchange Sync protocol does not support these “custom” fields so when the phone tries to sync with the server this info gets lost."
I told Siri to text my mom. Siri asked who my mom was. I told her. Siri recorded that information and relationship in the contact database. Next time I said, "Send a text to my mom," Siri did.
Siri learned the relationship.
40 million iPads sold. In a "down" economy.
Kind of missing the point. Siri is about convenience.
For example, I could swipe to unlock my phone, find the clock app, open it, switch to the Timer, change the hours and minutes to one hour, then click start. Or I could say, "Wake me in an hour."
Or I could unlock my phone, find the weather app and open it, switch to Denver, and scroll down to Sat and Sun... or I could say, "What's the weather this weekend in Denver?"
Or I could again unlock my phone, find the message app and open it, switch out of my work thread, find my girlfriend's thread, switch to it, start typing, and then hit send... or I could say, "Tell Peggy I'm going to be 10 minutes late."
And the stuff like, "Remind me to call my mom when I get home?" How many taps, strokes, and typing is it going to take to set that up manually?
Every single one of those actions can be done quicker and easier with Siri. And true, there may be some places where typing is "better", in that's it's more private or more unobtrusive, but that's not true all of the time.
They built voice input into the keyboard, so any app that's expecting text to be typed into a field can do voice. From what I've seen, there's no API access, however.
"... you'd already know that are in fact OSS packages that do pretty much what Siri does..."
Okay, I'll bite. Got links? Demos? Anything at all to backup your assertion?
It's a hack. A hack that works, but still a hack.
You can also do the something similar to "text" tweets to Twitter.
"The genius of apple has always been knowing the minimum they need to provide for success."
And then actually providing it, which puts them ahead of about 95% of their competition.
You might look up the definitions and differences between "weak" AI and "strong" AI. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Siri uses weak AI to perform NLP and command recognition. It's true that Siri only knows how to do the things it's been told how to do, but it's still a version of AI.
"From what we've seen so far, it can't as it has no facility for "learning"."
You mean, since last Friday?
Did you look up the reference to CALO?
"CALO was an Artificial Intelligence project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)[1] under its Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program. Its five-year contract brought together 300+ researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions, with the goal of building a new generation of cognitive assistants that can reason [NOTE], learn from experience [NOTE], be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise."
Reason and learn. It's weak AI, aimed primarily at NLP and command recognition, but it's far, far more than a mere chatterbot that's been hardwired to recognize a few keywords.
"... very very few of whom were at all receptive to the most crucial idea he tried to impart to them: you should make money, not merely get money."
I'd revise this. That you need to provide a valuable product or service, for which people are willing to give you money.
The TV will still show that. This way they still get the lines AND manage not to piss off millions of people at the same time.
Not to mention the small part about not everyone living next to an Apple store.
As stated above, AT&T announced that they sold 200,000 in the first 12 hours... all by themselves.
Read that again. AT&T, alone, without Apple stores, Apple Online, Verizon, Sprint, Best Buy, or Radio Shack sold more iPhone 4Ss in 12 hours than most phones sell in their first week.
Some restrictions...
"This hurts even more in a downturn economy, where people aren't generally buying *OOOH SHINY* rather they're in the paycheque to paycheque."
That explains the iPad.
Wait.
AT&T announced they sold 200,000 in the first 12 hours alone.
Is that more than dozens?
If shorter, more concise code was always better, we'd have switched to APL years ago.
We didn't.
If you're WAITING for a call in the aforementioned scenario, you don't need to enter a PIN code.