Could Apple’s Siri benefit your business?

Posted on 20 October 2011

You’d have to be living on another planet to miss the launch of Apple’s latest iPhone the 4S, but have you spotted ‘Siri’ the personal assistant and voice recognition application? This is, in my opinion, the most exciting development to hit computing since the microchip!

All the demonstrations I’ve seen ask Siri ‘What’s the weather like today?” or “Will I need an umbrella today?” Then they add as an after thought, “in San Francisco?” and miraculously Siri returns with the spoken response “You’ll need your umbrella today in San Francisco.”

The demonstrations are clever but whilst Siri is still in beta, it isn’t claimed to be Artificial Intelligence (AI) although it does understand conversational concepts and will link previous requests to the current. It also knows where you are, from GPS co-ordinates and from your diary what your schedule is, so by asking what’s the “Weather like today?” without adding “in [place name]” it can give you the forecast for your current location.

Like many of Apple’s best technology introductions, Siri isn’t new. It began life almost a decade ago as a cognitive learning exercise by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of its Department of Defence. Dubbed the Personal Assistant with Learning capability (PAL), its objective is to help the user complete tasks on-line, particularly in a mobile context.

Is Siri a search engine? Well no, it’s not. It’s presenting the results of searches derived from your request and putting them in a contextual way, giving you both a graphical and audible response. You can ask which cinema is showing a particular film or which is the most highly recommended Greek restaurant and, if there is an application to support on-line booking, it will book the table for you.

Siri integrates a few dozen Application Program Interfaces (APIs) from well-known applications that enable it to simultaneously interrogate several web servers to obtain the answers the user is looking for. This isn’t Google, it doesn’t present many pages of answers, rather it learns what you prefer and offers recommendations.

We’ve recently discussed how different interfaces, like styli and touch-screens, have been brought to the Auto-ID and data capture industry’s rugged mobile computers, each changing the way workers interface with their mobile computers. Could Siri be the next big interface?

Could it be used to help mobile workers, interrogating back office systems to obtain the fastest delivery or cheapest price product for their customer? Yes it probably could, but it would most likely be complete overkill, because its skill is simultaneous, multiple queries. Siri has taken ten years and millions of dollars to develop; it has voice recognition (although it isn’t dependent on it), cognitive learning abilities, time and space awareness, plus an understanding of context and conversational structure and that’s just the public beta version…

When the late Steve Jobs presented the then new MAC with the revolutionary mouse in 1984, it also wasn’t ‘new’. What was new, however, was how he integrated it with MAC OS and a graphical user interface. The mouse became the pointing device of choice for countless millions of computer users.

I’m certain that Siri will similarly become ubiquitous, especially in the iPhone/iPod/iPad/Mac world, with millions of users becoming reliant on it to perform ever more complex searches and queries, in the simplest of ways. And just as the Auto-ID industry has adopted other ‘new’ interfaces in the past, it will also benefit from a ‘Siri-esque’ product in the future.

Have you already seen a Siri demonstration, or perhaps had a play with it yourself? Whilst I await collection of my iPhone 4S I rely on you, my readers, to share your real world experiences of Siri so far…

If you have I’d really like to know your thoughts, so please feel free to leave a comment below. Of course, if you’d like to discuss a possible mobile solution for your business, drop me an email or call the team in the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808.