The Story of Siri, by its founder [video]

https://wit.ai/blog/2014/12/18/adam-keynote

by ar7hur • 12 years ago

75 15 12 years ago

wit.ai

natch• 12 years ago

"Sorry, because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here."

Is this only me? I'm not blocking cookies or anything like that.

ar7hur3• 12 years ago

Sorry about that, it should be fixed now. Can you please confirm?

juergen• 12 years ago

works for me

ar7hur3• 12 years ago

Synopsys:

    Walking backward in time, Adam discussed the technical
    history of Siri as well as how the vision of virtual
    personal assistants evolved over time. He wowed the 
    audience with a video from 1987 on a concept from Apple
    where predicted a Siri like device 24 years in the future
    and was only off by 2 weeks.

luxpir2• 12 years ago

Unfortunately brought 1980s gender prejudices with it. Siri and Cortana defaulting to female voices? Way to miss an opportunity, market leaders.

ar7hur3• 12 years ago

In France, Siri has a male voice!

emersive• 12 years ago

I hadn't really thought about that. My wife is a feminist and it is one of the things that drew me to her. She has definitely helped me recognize these kinds of things in the past. And I have become more sensitive to this, but clearly I have a ways to go.

Thanks for bringing this up.

revscat• 12 years ago

1) Siri has a male voice available as a configuration option.

2) There have been frequent studies which show that there is a natural (i.e. not cultural) bias towards finding female voices more pleasant, and such preferences begin in the womb[1]. CNN[2] has a story which provides a good overview of this topic, and I am sure you could find other information about if you feel so inclined.

Basically, I do not think the decision to make Siri female was based upon simple prejudice. There are good, scientific reasons for doing so.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/208/4448/1174.short

[2] http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/tech/innovation/female-compute...

bsaul• 12 years ago

This video should be broadcasted to every politician remotely involved in industry, job creation, research or education (yes, that means probably all of them) to show how a succesful technology really is the (slow) product of an entire ecosystem combined with great minds of all kinds.

jud_white• 12 years ago

Oct 4: Apple launches Siri

Oct 5: Steve Jobs dies

  One kind of side note. On October 5th, Steve Jobs died.
  He had been involved in a lot of the process leading up to it.
  We know that he was watching this launch from his house.
  I don't know what he thought about it, but I like to project
  that he saw it, said "It is good. This is the future, Apple's
  in the middle of it. I can go now." I don't know if that's true,
  but that's a projection that I like to put onto it.

I suppose this is the kind of statement you could expect from the creator of a predictive personal assistant, but wow.

valleyer• 12 years ago

I too found this extremely gratuitous.

ttflee• 12 years ago

The ontology IDE was so amazing.

tomphoolery• 12 years ago

I thought the talk about Siri being a service orchestration engine was pretty interesting. With the growing amount of internet services, and most importantly, services competing within the same domain, perhaps the most interesting web apps of the future will be mostly amalgamating the data between these services in intelligent ways.

The Story of Siri, by its founder [video]

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