Via Forbes
By E.D. Kain
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Outside of its remarkable sales, the real star of the iPhone 4S show
has been Siri, Apple’s new voice recognition software. The intuitive
voice recognition software is the closest to A.I. we’ve seen on a
smartphone to date.
Over the weekend I noted
that Siri has some resemblance to the IBM supercomputer, Watson, and
speculated that someday Watson would be in our pockets while the
supercomputers of the future might look a lot more like the Artificial
Intelligence we’ve read about in science fiction novels today, such as
the mysterious Wintermute from William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
Over at Wired, John Stokes explains how Siri and the Apple cloud could lead to the advent of a real Artificial Intelligence:
In
the traditional world of canned, chatterbot-style “AI,” users had to
wait for a software update to get access to new input/output pairs. But
since Siri is a cloud application, Apple’s engineers can continuously
keep adding these hard-coded input/output pairs to it. Every time an
Apple engineer thinks of a clever response for Siri to give to a
particular bit of input, that engineer can insert the new pair into
Siri’s repertoire instantaneously, so that the very next instant every
one of the service’s millions of users will have access to it. Apple
engineers can also take a look at the kinds of queries that are popular
with Siri users at any given moment, and add canned responses based on
what’s trending.
In this way, we can expect Siri’s repertoire of clever
comebacks to grow in real-time through the collective effort of hundreds
of Apple employees and tens or hundreds of millions of users, until it
reaches the point where an adult user will be able to carry out a
multipart exchange with the bot that, for all intents and purposes,
looks like an intelligent conversation.
Meanwhile, the technology undergirding the software and iPhone
hardware will continue to improve. Now, this may not be the AI we had in
mind, but it also probably won’t be the final word in Artificial
Intelligence either. Other companies, such as IBM, are working to
develop other ‘cognitive computers‘ as well.
And while the Singularity may indeed be far, far away, it’s still exciting to see how some forms of A.I. may emerge at least in part through cloud-sourcing.
