....................{31 AUG '13}
8/30/2013 @ 10:55AM
...Siri Is Great..., But When Will We Get 'Jarvis'?
1)...I like Siri.
2)...No, really.
3)...I use Siri on my iPhone all the time.
4)...Admittedly, though, the most common uses are “Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes” when I’m cooking something, or “Siri, play Mockingbird by Eminem” when I want to listen to a specific song.
5)...There are still many things Siri is not very good at.
6)...In fact, sort of most of the things.
7)...My son has an Android smartphone.
8)...Android doesn’t give it’s voice recognizing artificial intelligence a cool name—like Siri—but it seems to work as well, or even better for some scenarios, than its iOS equivalent.
9)...Google actually goes one step farther with the Google Now service that actually learns about you and your life, and attempts to proactively deliver relevant information without you asking for it.
10)...Both of them fall far short of the ultimate goal, though—which is “Jarvis”.
11)...Who is Jarvis?
12)...If you’ve seen any of the Iron Man movies, you know who Jarvis is.
13)...Jarvis is Tony Stark’s (the genius billionaire playboy alter ego of Iron Man) virtual concierge.
14)...Jarvis doesn’t just answer questions about who won the Texans game, or help you find movie tickets—perhaps to the next Iron Man movie, though.
15)...Jarvis knows Tony Stark as well or better than Tony Stark knows himself, and Jarvis has personality that puts Siri’s snarky sarcasm to shame.
16)...I want Jarvis.
How do we get there?
17)...To figure out where we stand on the timeline between now and Jarvis, I went to the source: Robert Scoble.
18)...Granted, Scoble isn’t personally working on the technology that will get us there, but he talks to the people who are.
19)...He claims Siri was launched in his house, and he is in a unique, and enviable position to peek behind the curtains and see what the future wizards of Silicon Valley are working on.
20)...Scoble is also co-author of a soon-to-be-released book titled Age of Context (co-written by Forbes contributor Shel Israel), and he is an avid—possibly rabid—proponent of the benefits of sharing personal information.
21)...From the very start of our conversation, it didn’t sound like we’re going to get Jarvis anytime soon.
22)...Scoble began ominously with, “The problem…so, there’s multiple problems on multiple levels.”
23)...The first—and possibly biggest—problem, is just developing technology that can actually understand what the hell you’re saying.
24)...I have a pretty good success rate with Siri, but I still have to repeat or re-state about 10 percent of the commands, which isn’t very efficient.
25)...For my wife and kids, Siri is even less accurate, sometimes to the point of being unusably dysfunctional.
26)...Scoble told me that Google’s voice recognition suffers from similar issues.
27)...He said that if you ask Google Glass to find “500 First Street”, it insists on converting it to “501st Street” which can be problematic for getting around in metropolitan areas that like to use numbers for street names.
28)...Nuance is sort of the de facto leader in voice recognition, and it’s the technology behind Siri, but Scoble believes Nuance has peaked, and that it doesn’t have the sort of innovation necessary to take us to the next level.
29)...He claims a source told him Google, Apple, Microsoft, and even Amazon are all working on their own next-generation voice recognition systems.
30)...The second problem is connectivity.
31)...The virtual assistant—whether it’s Siri, Google, or something else—is just a voice recognition front-end for the databases and computer services it’s connected to.
32)...The information may be available, but if Apple doesn’t have an arrangement to allow Siri to access it, it may as well not exist.
33)...Scoble relayed an example.
34)...“Siri, even if it understands you—like, you can ask it something like “How many people are checked in at the Ritz on Foursquare?” It understands you.
35)...It turns that into the right words.
36)...But, it’s not hooked up—and there is an API, by the way, and there is an answer for that on the Internet,
but the Siri system is not hooked up to Foursquare, and so it takes you to Bing , and it gives you a stupid answer, and it breaks.”
Who do you trust?
37)...Possibly the biggest hurdle, though, when it comes to moving from Siri to Jarvis is privacy—and our personal and social stigmas about sharing information with a third party.
38)...There are two elements to this hurdle—which entities you trust to store your data, and the regulatory and privacy regulations that prevent key information from being shared.
39)...Jarvis—or whatever the next-generation virtual concierge is called—will need some way to store and access all of the relevant information about you.
40)...Your device—whether it’s a smartphone or tablet, or some new gadget like a smartwatch or Google Glass—will not have enough built-in storage capacity to remember every detail of your life.
41)...Even if it could, that would be a huge privacy and data security concern because portable / mobile gadgets are also very easily lost or stolen.
42)...The cloud makes sense because it can store virtually unlimited amounts of data that can be accessed from just about anywhere.
43)...It allows your Siri, or Google Now, or “Jarvis” to exist simultaneously on multiple devices and platforms, rather than being held hostage in one gadget.
44)...It’s not a matter of sharing intimate details of your life with the world.
45)...We’re not talking about posting sensitive data publicly on a social network.
46)...We’re just talking about trusting a third party and sharing your personal data with that company.
47)...The question is, “which cloud?”
38)...Do you trust Google more than Apple, or Microsoft more than Google?
39)...Back in May, I wrote about Google’s “creepy factor”.
40)...The fact is that the more you’re willing to share personal data and sensitive information with Google, the more awesome Google can be for you.
41)...The value of the services Google provides are a direct reflection of Google’s ability to deliver relevant information in real-time because it knows where you are, where you’re going, who you know, and what you like.
42)...Even if you trust Google, or Apple, or Microsoft, or whichever company with your information, the next obstacle is getting the various entities that store your personal data to play nicely with each other.
43)...To get from Siri to Jarvis, the virtual concierge should have access to your complete medical history, your investments and financial details, and more.
44)...All of that information may exist online somewhere, and it may be accessible by you—but only in separate silos.
45)...Regulations like SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), or PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards), as well as other regional privacy laws get in the way of sharing the kind of information that needs to be shared in order to transform Siri to Jarvis.
46)...We’re heading in the right direction, and we’ll probably get there someday.
47)...But, we’re probably at least five years off in terms of the technology being accurate and effective enough to provide Jarvis-like service,
and possibly even further away from breaking down the social and regulatory barriers necessary to enable access to the right information.
48)...Of course, once we get from Siri to Jarvis, we’ll have to start worrying about Jarvis becoming HAL 9000, or GLaDOS, or WOPR.
40)...One thing at a time.
AI
