Some of you may remember the Apple’s knowledge navigator video posted here. It was released in 1987 as a vision of a future tight integration of advanced technologies on a flat tablet computer. The computer in this entertaining vision clip sports a fancy Web-like interface, a realistic avatar, touch screen with gesture recognition, teleconferencing, speech recognition, natural language understanding, all of that from 5 to 15 years before they were actually available in some shape or form. I remember watching this during my first years at Bell Labs when the recognition of connected digits was still one of the main challenges, a vocabulary of 1,000 words was considered a large one (a million word vocabulary does not scare anyone in speech recognition today), and all we had for training speech recognizer was a few thousand utterances (today we talk about 100s of millions of utterances).
An ante-litteram vision of Siri
2 responses to “An ante-litteram vision of Siri”
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Great post Roberto. I too used this Knowledge Navigator video tape in teaching classes. This was pre- world wide web, pre-WiFi, pre-smartphone. One gap in the vision was that the professor left the machine on the desk so how could the Intelligent Agent track his preferences.
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Thanks Susann. Good point! Maybe, like in HAL-9000, it has wireless sensors all over the places?
THE VOICE IN THE MACHINE 
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