About three weeks ago, Apple unleashed its latest and greatest iPhone.  The new 4s looks identical to my (now ancient) 4, but, according to the specs (and as I can personally attest from my recent visit at the Palo Alto Apple store) this is an entirely different animal.  Under the proverbial “hood”, lurking among goodies such as a dual core A5 chip, a significantly improved camera and other better/faster innards is Siri.

Yep, folks, this is the very same Siri I wrote about here, just a little more than a year and a half ago.  Fast forward 18+ months later and this AI is already in the hands of over a million people and will very soon be in the hands of millions more around the world.

To my knowledge,  there is no publicly available data, not at this point anyway, that tells us how Siri is being used.  Is it as the commercials depict?  People are composing emails, reminders, finding restaurants, checking on the weather forecast etc., or asking it “deep” questions such as “will you marry me” or throwing wishful, but vague instructions such as “beam me up?”  Eventually, and hopefully soon, some of that data may be, at least indirectly, gleaned from the types of apps that will hook into Siri.  For instance: Ask Siri for directions to Napa Valley and it (or “she”, according to a friend using Siri in Germany) will use my GPS app (Navigon) to guide me there.  Will Siri glean information from Navigon and deliver it to me, or will she hand it off to Navigon with a “Navigon is ready to help you now?”

Siri’s significance can also be gleaned from how competitors are referring to it.  Take for example the following statement, attributed to Google’s Andy Rubin: “You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side.”  I don’t know about you, but to me that statement smells a bit like “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” (Digital Equipment Corp.’s founder and CEO Ken Olson).  Rubin’s statement is also a bit odd given that Google does have voice-activated features (Google  Voice), though not (yet) at Siri’s level.

From an AI perspective the introduction of Siri is a watershed development, finally bringing this technology to a phenomenally popular consumer device.  And this is about to get even bigger and soon.  This is because even though at this point we’re only seeing her in the iPhone 4s, rumors are that she will be soon arriving in the iPad and the much-hyped Apple TV (not the little black box version, but a full-blown Apple-branded TV).   We also need to keep in mind that this is all very new and she is really somewhere between an alpha and beta-level product.  Once she moves into the world of versions with decimal point numbers we will probably look back and chuckle at the early awkwardness.

From a computational law perspective, Siri brings intriguing possibilities helping make legal decisions more accessible to everyone.  Consider for example, you are going to lease a used car through an on-line broker such as Carsoup.com.  Imagine also that Carsoup has an iPhone app and that it is designed so you can conduct the entire lease transaction through it.  You go and navigate through the application process and throughout you can ask Siri any variety of legal questions about various legal aspects of the application.  You want to know, for instance, whether the warranty on the used car you’re interested in is reasonable.  Siri could provide an answer such as “In comparing the warranty terms of 13 other car dealers in a 200-mile radius from your current location for the same car, this warranty is similar to all of them.  You’re not going to find a better deal in this region.  It’s ok.” (Note: I’m purposefully not addressing at this point whether Siri’s answer would be illegal if properly viewed as unauthorized practice of law.)

Now let’s take this one step further.  Suppose that Siri-like AI capabilities would not only be used by a human user but by other AI-interface capable apps (AIICA).  These apps would be able to leverage AI capabilities residing on the mobile device and query it for their needs.  For example, an app would be able to fix itself by querying the AI about a problem it encountered.  Another example is where the AIICA updates itself to meet the user’s needs more dynamically and perhaps independently of the AIICA developer.  The possibilities here are quite limitless.

It was 18 months ago that we learned that Siri began to be integrated into the Apple product line.  I’m intrigued by what we will see 18 months from now.

Tags: AiCE