SIRI
RISING
weekend: figure out how to harness the best ideas from CALO
and Vanguard to seed a startup.
It was at the Cypress Inn at Half
Moon Bay, a quiet, coastal town
just south of San Francisco, that
the vision for Siri was born. This
mobile virtual assistant — like
CALO, and in tune with Engelbart’s thesis — would be put to
work relieving humanity of lowgrade mental busywork.
The working nickname for this
assistant was HAL. The proposed
tagline: “HAL’s back — but this
time he’s good.”
THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION
Virtual assistants had long proved
a kind of siren song to an entire
crew of Silicon Valley dreamers
that wound up shipwrecked in
pursuit of a more human, intelligent and helpful HAL.
Over a decade earlier, in 1994,
Wildfire Communications debuted
a new telephone-based assistant,
“Wildfire,” that could handle messages, place calls and retrieve
voicemail in response to a prompt.
Wildfire earned g ood reviews,
but saw little pickup, despite the
fact that “she” charmed users
with sassy responses. A few years
later, Microsoft Office’s assistant
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
Clippy, an over-eager bouncing
paperclip volunteering tips and
shortcuts, launched to the chagrin of office workers everywhere.
Eventually, Clippy made TIME’s
list of 50 worst inventions. In
“OUR WHOLE TREND
IS TOWARD EVER MORE
INTIMATE INTERACTIONS
WITH MACHINES.”
1998, General Magic’s Portico
promised to connect the and cell
phones with a voice-controlled
aide that could read emails and
take messages, among other tasks.
Within four years, the company
shut down the assistant and filed
for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Yet if ever there were a right
place and a right time for virtual
assistants, the fall of 2007 appeared to be it. Faster wireless
speeds, better speech recognition,
the rise of cloud computing, the
debut of Apple’s iPhone and a flood
of new web services made virtual
helpers seem attainable at last.
The SRI crew could see that
the iPhone, which had launched
just before their excursion to Half
Moon Bay, would yield a population of networked, always-on-the-