Bit more Siri background:
“For a half-century, the concept of communicating with computers as effortlessly as we do with each other has remained as illusive as it is captivating,” Steve Tobak reports for CBS News. “That is, until October of this year, when the technology that will change our lives in ways we’ve always dreamed somehow managed to sneak under the radar in a smartphone upgrade.”
Tobak reports, “That technology is Siri, the eerily human-sounding interface in the iPhone 4S. Apple calls Siri ‘The intelligent assistant that helps you get things done. All you have to do is ask.’ Beneath that innocent-sounding marketing blurb, however, is a remarkable innovation that took two dozen of America’s greatest research institutions more than 40 years to develop. The current version of Siri represents the first stage of a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence — the study and design of intelligent systems that perceive and act on their environment.”
“Siri’s technology represents decades of combined research on artificial intelligence from more than 20 universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale,” Tobak reports. “It’s a spinoff of SRI’s Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) project that was originally funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Perceptive Assistant that Learns (PAL) program.”
