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Siri Assistant Turns Your iPhone into a Personal Assistant

Clay Edwards — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:23:34 +0000

At the beginning of the week, Dag Kittlaus wrote a post for Mashable about the birth of the virtual assistant. Today, Dag’s company, Siri, is releasing its iPhone app, Siri Assistant. Siri helps people get things done, by combining intelligent voice recognition with hooks into tons of different web services, making it easy for people to use their mobile devices to get things done.

When I talked to Dag a few weeks ago, he gave me a demo of what Siri Assistant is and what it does. The concept is pretty powerful: talk to your phone and let it find and make plans for you. So instead of going directly to a website and doing a traditional search for movie tickets at a certain time, I can just say “Get me movie tickets for Shutter *Island around 9 pm” and options for theaters near me (or theaters that I have previously indicated are my favorites) will show up and I can then purchase tickets directly from my phone.

Check out this screencast to see more of what Siri Assistant can do:

Siri was born from SRI’s CALO Project. The CALO Project (or Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) is the largest Artificial Intelligence project in US History. DARPA invested $150 million into CALO over the course of 5 years. What was learned from CALO has been implemented into Siri.

Using natural language understanding (think the Dragon Search and Dragon Dictation apps for the iPhone) to connect with existing services and APIs and traditional search components, Siri can become very adept at helping people get things done.

Siri has more than 30 different partners whose APIs the app can plug into when answering a request. These include services like OpenTable, MovieTickets.com, Eventful (), StubHub, Taxi Magic, Rotten Tomatos, Bing (), Google Maps (), and Yelp (). This list of partners will continue to expand over time.

What I was particularly impressed with is that if you have existing accounts with these services, you can log in to them and have Siri remember those credentials — so you can get your OpenTable points or use your MovieWatcher card. Siri will also offer up results from Bing if it can’t find something with one of its partners, so you aren’t just limited to the services that are integrated at the API level with Siri.

When I think about the best use cases for something like Siri, I think about when unexpected things come up — say you need to book a flight to a different city and also get a hotel room and taxi — and time is of the essence. It’s much easier and faster to say what you need than to have to go through the manual search mechanisms.

Siri gets better the more you use it, can adapt to the places you frequent, and can use technologies like geolocation to find better results. You can correct it with text input if the voice recognition isn’t right and also use traditional text input to get results.

Siri Assistant is free and available right now in the App Store. It’s an amazing first glimpse of a Jetsonian type of future. Now all I need is my jetpack and my robotic maid!

What do you think about the advancements in voice recognition and how they are changing how we can get things done? Let us know!

Awesome, simple and affordable contact management system!

Clay Edwards — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:20:01 +0000

Manage your daily tasks, build your relationships, and turn contacts into customers; all in one place, available all the time and from anywhere you want to work.

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Use your calendar and define the tasks you need to accomplish. Review your contacts, assign them to groups, and make them an integral part of your sales process. In the Relationship Builder, you can create and schedule sales campaigns that address whole groups of customers in a pre-defined, step-by-step process.

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Is multi-tasking really working for you?

Clay Edwards — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:19:10 +0000

After my laptop crashed today I had a rude reminder on my hands that doing too much at one time isn’t the best solution. Much like the motorcycle rider in this photo. You know, the one with the Big Gulp in a friggin CUP HOLDER on his bike! Sometimes we all try to do so much that we fail to see the risks involved. Over the next few days try an experiment for me and let me know your results. Ready? Here it is…. Close Outlook!!!! (or which ever email program you use) and only open it twice a day to go through your email. Shocking? Revolutionary? No, just a more streamlined way of doing things. I mean, you wouldn’t try to juggle and go down a ladder at the same time would you? Well, stress can be a killer too. So, try my experiment and try a different approach for a change. Who knows, you may like it! Oh, and be sure to leave a comment and tell me your results!!!

Regards,

Clay

Posted via email from Clay Edwards’ Posterous