27th
Siri will give the first public demo of its virtual personal assistant tomorrow (Thursday) at the WSJ’s D conference.
In addition to the TechCrunch post, Elise Ackerman also wrote up an excellent piece for the Merc. And for even more info, video, and a mockup of a conversation with Siri, check out the MIT Tech Review’s profile from back in February.
I’ve been excited about Siri for a long while now, and it’s gratifying to open up and start showing the world what the team has built.
The vision is that everyone will have an assistant, a virtual agent that transacts on your behalf. Siri is focusing at first on “out and about” use cases, though they’ll certainly expand to other domains over time. Their app will enter private beta this Summer.
This isn’t HAL 9000 in the making, to be clear — Siri is all about tasks, tasks that we humans are not neccessarily particularly well-suited for in the higher-level cognitive sense — like making restaurant reservations, buying movie tickets, checking flight times, and guaging the weather, etc. Especially on mobile devices, the assistant metaphor makes a ton of sense.
I’ve been thinking a lot, though, about the bigger-pictrue ramifications of technologies like Siri. When everyone does indeed have an assistant, what industries will be entirely disrupted? How will the ecosystemm of API’s and services evolve? How will trust and ethics come into play?
Disclosure: Siri is a client.
