How Siri Works
By Jeff Wofford October 5, 2011
Once again someone has offered us incredible artificial intelligence, and once again we are bracing for disappointment. It happened with handwriting recognition on the Newton, which proved to be slow and clumsy. It happened with the not-as-smart-as-they-first-appeared creatures of Lionhead's Black and White. And remember the Kinect debut video showing a kid interacting with an on-screen villain effortlessly, the AI character perfectly intoning the kid's name? Kinect brought some of the innovations promised in that early teaser, but clearly the video implied a level of sophistication and polish that turned to vapor in the end.
But it's Apple this time, with Siri on the iPhone 4S. And although Apple has screwed up before-witness the aforementioned Newton-if anyone has the motivation, the resources, and the smarts to get AI right, the iPhone dev team is it.
Having programmed and taught artificial intelligence in video games for almost twenty years, I am deeply skeptical-you might almost say cynical-about claims to offer a truly useful and usable intelligent agent. Ordinary people-those who don't study AI-have big hopes (and fears) about AI, and marketers prey on these fantasies. In reality AI is, on the whole, a hoax. Virtually everything we call "AI" today is either a theatrical display of essentially scripted behavior (that's how most game AI works), a massive database (such as Google Suggestions and expert systems) or a vague and decidedly unintelligent jumble of neural networks and genetic algorithms. So-called "artificially intelligent" programs are generally either too limited or too clumsy to be useful in helping ordinary people do ordinary tasks. So will Siri be different?
Despite my skepticism, I actually think the answer is "yes." I think Siri will do more or less what Apple promised yesterday.
The reason it will work is that it actually has fairly modest ambitions-more modest than they first appear.
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