Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late

http://waxy.org/2011/10/apples_1987_knowledge_navigator_only_one_month_late/

by planb • 15 years ago

244 45 15 years ago

Putting aside the dated hardware (and hairstyles!), this technology is still a ways off. Yes, Siri is a good start, but it doesn't come anywhere near the type of conversational fluency and contextual awareness that the virtual assistant in this video does.

Honestly, I think we're still 10 or 20 years out from that.

jff• 15 years ago

The great AI promise, huh? "True conversational AI is about 10-20 years away" :)

ebiester2• 15 years ago

We're frustratingly close on voice recognition, and I know people using computers for day to day dictation. The interesting thing is that the problem is training and practice, not algorithmic, and Google's wrapping that up now. (As far as I can tell, they're on the forefront of computational linguistics.)

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.

wslh2• 15 years ago

But wasn't HAL ready on 2001?

_delirium2• 15 years ago

Heck, some of his comments to the device are vague enough that a typical human wouldn't be 100% sure what the desired information is.

mindstab• 15 years ago

also Siri is a purchased piece of tech, not at all developed by Apple

_delirium2• 15 years ago

And Siri in turn was more or less a commercialization-oriented spinoff of this DARPA-funded project from SRI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO

fady• 15 years ago

one of the best concepts i've seen from apple. yes, siri does not do all that, but, you certainly can manage most of it with all the apps available..nice find, nice find indeed!

pennig• 15 years ago

Behold, the power of OpenDoc!

coob• 15 years ago

Xcode 4 really reminds me of OpenDoc, just for dev tools.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

That assistant looks like Bill Nye :-) I wonder if anyone showed this video as prior art in the iPad patent discussion.

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.

stevejohnson2• 15 years ago

Ironically, this video was made at the request of one of the CEOs who was booted during Apple's dark period. (Gil Amelio? Edit: See child, it was John Sculley.)

Source: Insanely Great. I don't have a copy to look it up in.

rbanffy• 15 years ago

John Sculley. Yes, the one who fired Steve Jobs.

rabble• 15 years ago

The video is a mix of two different videos, one from 1987, and one from 1997. The CyberDog / OpenDoc stuff in the second half is obviously not from the 80's as those projects were created in 1996-1997.

epaulson• 15 years ago

When does it switch from the older video to the newer video? It looked to me like all 5:45 was the same video.

Semiapies• 15 years ago

Going by the comments there, I believe the blogger updated the video to one with just the older clip, so as not to confuse people.

sp332• 15 years ago

"maren" here on HN founded http://zirtual.com/ , so you can get a real human assistant while we wait for the future :)

primigenus• 15 years ago

"Your sensitive stuff is safe with us. Whether it's your email address, or usernames or passwords, your dedicated Zirtual Assistant would rather fall on their sword than divulge any of your sensitive information to internet creepers!" Hmm. Creepy!

doomlaser• 15 years ago

Except that Siri has been out on the App Store since 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AohzWSkAU7c

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.

Cushman2• 15 years ago

Wait, really? Apple's main product release is actually a product retraction?

Damn. They got some marketing balls.

m_eiman• 15 years ago

More like a new set of system requirements…

spinchange2• 15 years ago

I hadn't heard anything about them removing the app from people who already have it. I will find it infuriating if an app I bought almost 2 years ago and still use is suddenly removed because of a marketing decision to tie it exclusively to a new product. It currently works on a 3GS and even on 3G with somewhat less functionality.

JeremyBanks• 15 years ago

Did you buy it? I thought it was free.

Siri's server will be doing down once the 3GS is released.

kinkora• 15 years ago

They seem to have also invented the concept of "checking-in". See video[1] at 0:38 second mark onwards where he talks about a student checking in at Guatemala.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8

joejohnson• 15 years ago

That's nice and all but this video is not from 1987.. 1997 maybe. The lady at the beginning of the video mentions Yahoo which didn't launch until 1995.

ljf• 15 years ago

Nope def. 1987: http://www.worldcat.org/title/educom-87-keynote-address/oclc...

At which point in the video do they mention Yahoo? I watched it again and couldn't hear it.

raquo• 15 years ago

It's sad that we still did not achieve the level smoothness and interoperability imagined in this video. Who cares about talking to the computer. Getting things done is still a bunch of ugly hacks.

larrywright• 15 years ago

I saw this on VHS when it originally came out, at an Apple user group meeting. I was 15 years old. I remember thinking at the time that it all seemed to far-fetched to become reality. I'm glad I was wrong.

ubercore• 15 years ago

You weren't, really. The reality we have today is far removed from that video. Like, really far removed.

civilian• 15 years ago

Apple also predicted that moms will still be nagging in 2011! Astounding. :)

mrich• 15 years ago

Let's not forget that speech recognition has been baked into Android for at least 2 years.

planb• 15 years ago

I really hope Siri is not so much about speech recognition but about "intention recognition". If something like "Text my wife that I'll be home at 8" really works without memorizing the exact phrase, then Siri is not just a voice interface, but indeed a personal assistant. I guess that's why Apple kept the name Siri - so the user thinks of "her" as a personality. That said, I'm very skeptical - has Apple ever added a beta tag to a main features of new hardware?

tjogin• 15 years ago

Sure, and speech recognition has been baked into iOS since at least june of 2010. This isn't merely speech recognition.

ck2• 15 years ago

Funny how someone mentioned this earlier today on HN and then someone manages to repost it as another entry.

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.

shubhamgoel• 15 years ago

insane

speek• 15 years ago

We took a lot of inspiration from this video over at Zazu (http://getzazu.com), it's great to see this video being acknowledged by the HN community!

spiffistan• 15 years ago

Regardless of the awkwardness of this, it's still incredibly fascinating to see. It's kind of like Google Wave meets FaceTime meets Siri and an Exahertz of AI.

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late

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