Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late
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Honestly, I think we're still 10 or 20 years out from that.
We have the ability to parse out questions and return answers at the level of Jeopardy champions with Watson. Today, Watson would have been #113 on the supercomputer 500. In 2005, it would have been #3. #113 in 2005 was a cluster of 1024 Xeon 2.4Ghz.
I hate doing apples to oranges, but the only comparison I could find was from cpubenchmark.net, which puts the Xeon 2.5ghz as 381 on their propriatary PassMark. A $335 E3-1275 runs a 9,109 with 4 cores. That's back of the napkin 20-25 times faster. Let's go with 20, extrapolate and say within six years a n equivalent 64-processor machine would be sufficient for Watson-level performance, well within the range of an individual lab, with "good-enough" voice recognition!
The last piece here is conversational flow. Chatbots have demonstrated that we're nowhere near yet. That's algorithmic as much as anything, but it's a pretty big topic in computational linguistics, so I'm hoping we'll have that cracked soon.
Expert systems look to be reasonable in 5-10 years with fluency, with conversational AI not far behind. We know what we need. It's not an unknown problem at this point, for the most part.
Most human contestants (at the champion level) know the answers to most the questions. The gamesmanship, according to the all-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in a recent Fresh Air interview (Jennings returned to the show to take on Watson) is in the button press timing.
Watson has superb accuracy.
The computer actually knew the answers to fewer questions than the humans, but when Watson did know the answers, it always got the buzzer.
Helps to pull back the curtain a bit at times.
True AI and speech are hard. They're getting good. Scary good at times. There's an Android voice-to-voice translation app I've used to communicate with a Mandarin speaker (I manage just a few phrases). After doing that, I spent about fifteen minutes just staring at my phone and realizing that another huge piece of my future was now my present.
And I know the pieces behind it: voice recognition (cloud-assisted), translation, speech synthesis. But it's still mind-bogglingly cool. To me at least.
For my kids, probably not so much.
My point was more that we know what's left. That hasn't been the case before the last five years or so.
Perhaps one of the most salient things to learn from this is that people with a vision, and a will, work continually toward that vision even when progress seems non-existent. A solid idea of what you'd like something to look like, elucidated clearly, can help shape products for years until what you imagine can be made real. When I saw Alan Kay talk about the Dynabook at one of Xerox PARC's lecture series I felt that here was a guy who had basically committed to this vision, and was knocking down objections one by one.
Source: Insanely Great. I don't have a copy to look it up in.
I'm not going to attribute the near-attainment of this lofty vision to the guy he fired, but I'm glad it has been brought this far.
But I guess the video is somewhat well known and any voice recognition from Apple will draw it's comparison.
Same video posted a year earlier with many more views http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8
What's interesting to me is how slow the UI obviously is - I guess they were trying to make it "realistic" for the time and therefore more believable than instantaneous (or it was a limitation of the software they used to create it). Reminds me of the "Lost in Space" movie where the UI from the future seemed too fast to them.
Until today that is. It's been artifically limited to Apple's forthcoming iPhone 4S, and current customers will have the service shut off for them on the 15th.
Damn. They got some marketing balls.
Siri's server will be doing down once the 3GS is released.
At which point in the video do they mention Yahoo? I watched it again and couldn't hear it.