Virtually Yours

The idea of virtual personal assistants that can help organise our lives better, search for merchandise or services when we need them, and perform routine tasks is one that’s been around since the early days of the computer age, and has been a staple of science fiction movies such as The Fifth Element and a perhaps darker vision in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This vision approached one step closer to realisation with the debut of Siri, the “personal assistant” application that launched with Apple’s iPhone 4S late last year. Almost immediately, Siri became an Internet phenomenon, with YouTube videos and blog sites devoted to the things Siri could do, funny things it would say and hacks to give it unauthorised functions, such as allowing it to work on earlier iPhone versions.

Before becoming a global sensation, Siri began as a spinoff of a research project funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US defence agency also responsible for an early stage of the Internet. The project’s work by research institute SRI International, intended for military use, involved artificial intelligence research and devising intelligent software agents capable of managing information, learning user behaviour and automating routine tasks. Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs apparently saw the significance of this type of conversational human-computer interface for organising the user’s everyday experience. He personally spearheaded Apple’s acquisition of Siri in April 2010, which led to its AI technology being integrated into the iPhone 4S.

Siri isn’t the only intelligent agent that’s making waves out there. Taking an approach geared more for business travel and entertainment is a Silicon Valley startup called Rearden Commerce. Already used by thousands of American Express’s business customers, the Rearden agent helps employees book, and if necessary reschedule, events including air travel, dining reservations and entertainment.

Developers are working on apps similar to Siri for other platforms such as Android and pre-4S iOS devices. Android devices come with built-in voice-recognition technology powered by its parent Google, but with its limited handsfree capabilities compared to Siri, third-party apps such as Speaktoit Assistant and Vlingo have come about. Without the resources of DARPA and Apple, however, the quality and functionality of these free-to-try apps may suffer in comparison.

An earlier attempt at a personal, intelligent user-centric interface that was not quite as warmly received as Siri was Microsoft Bob, a software the tech giant released back in 1995 as an attempt to perk up and personalise the Windows interface with a new “social interface” for the newbie computer user. It comprised a home-oriented desktop and friendly onscreen animated personalities – “Friends of Bob” that acted as personal guides and offered suggestions, answered conversational questions and volunteered help with routine tasks such as sending e-mails. Unfortunately, Microsoft Bob was a big flop and died a swift death, but Microsoft persisted with interactive, personality-based helper agents in its Office suite and Windows OS for years. The most notorious of these was Clippy, a “talking” paperclip, which users deemed so annoying and intrusive that Microsoft launched a whole “Kill Clippy” anti-marketing campaign to say a final adiós to the widely reviled paperclip!

Although Bob didn’t boast advanced technologies such as speech recognition, GPS or web search (the World Wide Web was relatively new then), it nonetheless shared similarities with Siri, such as using natural language and full sentences to communicate with the user instead of standard, impersonal OS prompts. Like Siri, Bob was also task-oriented. Instead of offering a standard path of menus, it would try to “learn” the most commonly used tasks of a user and present those options first on the virtual home desktop.

Even with all of the apparent capabilities of virtual assistants like Siri, it remains early days yet for intelligent agent technology. To explain certain kinks users have noticed, Apple has uncharacteristically maintained Siri to be a “beta” or test product. While Siri is being honed and polished to final product, and as similar technologies emerge, particularly in the increasing sophistication of user interfaces such as voice control and gesture recognition, it remains to be seen whether users will adopt intelligent agents on a wide scale, and turn our visions of an automated lifestyle one step closer to virtual reality.