YOUTUBE/SIRIVID
SIRI
RISING
ry: a Defense Department-funded
undertaking that sought to build a
virtual assistant that could reason
and learn.
At its original debut, in 2010,
Siri had been able to connect with
42 different web services — from
Yelp and StubHub to Rotten Tomatoes and Wolfram Alpha —
then return a single answer that
integrated the best details culled
from those diverse sources. It had
been able to buy tickets, reserve a
table and summon a taxi, all without a user having to open another
app, register for a separate service
or place a call. It was already on
the verge of “intuiting” a user’s
pet peeves and preferences to the
point that it would have been able
to seamlessly match its suggestions to his or her personality.
At a 2010 tech conference, Siri
co-founder Tom Gruber demonstrated the app’s reach: Telling
the assistant, “I’d like a romantic place for Italian food near my
office,” yielded an answer that
seamlessly combined facts from
Citysearch, Gayot, Yelp, Yahoo!
Local, AllMenus.com, Google
Maps, BooRah and OpenTable.
As conceived by its creators,
Siri was supposed to be a “do engine,” something that would al-
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
A demo
version of the
early Siri from
2010.
low people to hold conversations
with the Internet. While a search
engine used stilted keywords to
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