Apple's New Iphone 4S's Talking Assistant is a Military Veteran

Job's fools everyone again. A lesson in how bring the riskiest possible application to the public for the first time. But, with ten years experience before the first commercial customer even gets to touch one. Oh, being a military vet myself, I can't wait.

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

The iPhone 4S’ Talking Assistant Is a Military Veteran

Siri, before you became the premiere feature of the new iPhone 4S, where did you come from?

Spencer, I started out as a gleam in the eye of Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research agency, as your Wired colleague Steven Levy tweeted. Darpa thought my artificial-intelligence algorithms for data collection and organization could help the military plan better. Would you like me to find you some references for that?

I would, Siri, thank you.

As it turns out, Siri — the voice-activated data assistant available on Apple’s iPhone upgrade — is a veteran. Nearly 10 years ago, Darpa funded a project known as PAL, for Personalized Assistant that Learns. It was an adaptive AI program for both data retrieval and data synthesis. (So not entirely like search, but not dissimilar, either.) If you told PAL what information you needed, and it observed what you did with that information, it would figure out a more efficient path to acquiring and sorting relevant information the next time around.

The project started out with a California company called SRI International. With a five-year, multimillion dollar grant from Darpa under the PAL program, SRI developed a system called CALO, for Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes. (Check out this handy chart of its architecture.) ”The goal of the project is to create cognitive software systems,” it explained, “that is, systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.” Read more at www.wired.com

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