My latest thinking about Siri over at TechGrid…
“Siri does not represent a foray into the realm of artificial intelligence, but rather a necessary stutter-step in that direction which can be more accurately referred to as Augmented Intelligence. Despite an ability to engage in limited natural language processing, Siri is only capable of augmenting the capabilities of an iPhone in ways that were pre-defined by her programmers. This augmentation will only be improved upon with future iterations of Siri and some day soon, she may become more context aware.
For example, ask Siri to play a game and she’ll trigger on the word “play” and look for a song or playlist that match the remainder of the interpreted words “play a game”. Tell her you really want to get drunk and she’ll offer to call you a cab, not find you a bar. As an augmented intelligence, Siri can be pretty helpful, but here are some ways we expect her to improve in the near-term.
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