3rd
The Age of Assistants
Norm hits the nail on the head over on RWW:
Assistants will leverage the best of the Web, not just to help you with the tasks you already have on your plate, but also to fundamentally extend your ability to get things done. They are digital prostheses that know what the Web can do for you (and who is good at doing what) and bring distributed intelligence to bear at the local level.
The vision of the assistant - indeed, many assistants - is possible today, an intricate orchestration of an array of sites and services on the fly, resulting in ultimate companionship for mobile lifestyles.
And:
The age of assistants will see a pendulum swing back to back-end engineering and serious R&D and long-term entrepreneurship. Every decade or so we see this kind of shift, a move to fundamentally upgrade the Web with focused, infrastructure-level innovation.
And with a strong set of venture exits and a demonstrable thirst for innovation that goes beyond so many opportunistic, trivial apps, the conditions are ripe.
Siri has proven that real VPAs are not only possible, they fill a need in the market (the company had 250,000 users within a month of launching).
Siri is a beginning, one that will spur further investment of time, money and brainpower. Be assured that developing virtual personal assistants is a capital-intensive undertaking. The potential reward is great - “10 Microsofts”, as it were. That’s a promise that will help further catalyze interest in AI from companies large and small.
Disclosure: SRI is a client.
