Tomorrow on the centenary of Alan Turing's birth why not impress your friends with some apps for your iPhone or iPad that reflect Turing's genius. The first is an Enigma Machine emulator called MyEnigma. You can select between different version of the machine: Enigma I, M3 and M4, Railway, G-312, or Swiss-K, and set them up just as you would a real Enigma: choose rotors, configure them, and use the plugboard to switch letters. If a friend has MyEnigma and both are set to the same settings then you can encrypt and decrypt messages just as with a real Enigma machine. You can also challenge yourself to see if you can crack the Enigma code as Alan Turing did in WWII (sorry there isn't an iOS app for his Bombe). As you can see from the screen shots MyEnigma looks quite realistic.
The second iOS app that is Turing related is the Turing Machine Simulator that allows you write programs for a Turing Machine, execute them and analyze the execution step by step. The app comes with example Turing programs to play with.
Of course if you own an iPhone 4S then you can see if Siri can pass the Turing Test. Try asking it, "Siri, would you like to take the Turing Test?" Update: I came across this article about iOS Turing apps a couple of days after Turing's centenary.
An interesting blog post from Lars Hard the founder and CEO of the the AI platform Expertmaker, called Beyond Siri: What AI means for the future of mobile devices and search. To make this future more real consider a few simple examples. Your intelligent agent on your phone, Siri 2.0 perhaps, says to you, "The Wine Boutique has just announced a special offer on the new vintage of your favorite label. Would you like me to reserve half a case for you?" Or Facebook might say, "Your sister is trying to organise a family get-together, you're free Sunday week, shall I tell her?" Or, perhaps Tripit 4.0 will say something like "There is a storm gathering over the Midwest. It looks like your flight will be delayed. Would you like me to book a hotel room now for this evening, and an alternate flight out first thing tomorrow?" These are all individually possible now, but collectively they could become very useful. It's not a new idea though. When Siri was launched, I commented in this post that Apple had envisaged this back in 1987. Of course then they didn't imagine the technology would be mobile and hence even more useful. Watch the video but image the Knowledge Navigator working on your phone.
I saw several articles yesterday, like this one, claiming that Apple's intelligent agent Siri is named after a Norwegian goddess and that Steve Jobs didn't like the name. Frankly I don't believe Siri is named after a Norwegian goddess. This seems like post-justification. Siri was a company, which Apple purchased, that was spun out of Stanford Research International, commonly known as SRI, which sounds a lot like "Siri" to me. The new company Siri Inc. called its product "Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface" or Siri. The history is all explained here in an earlier post on this blog. Wikipedia makes no mention of Siri being named after a Norwegian goddess and there doesn't even seem to be a Norwegian goddess called Siri. Sigrid is a Scandinavian female name, for which Siri is a diminutive, and it does mean victory, wisdom and beautiful according to Wikipedia, but there's no mention of a goddess. Personally, I'll continue to believe that Siri derives from SRI, which at least is supported by historical fact. I have no opinion on whether or not Steve Jobs liked the name. Incidentally I asked Siri the origin of its name and it was evasive and refused to answer.
Articles about Siri continue to appear in the tech blogs and publications as people increasingly start to recognise how important Siri is. It reportedly correctly understands commands about 9 times out of 10, which if you think about it is probably better than a person would. Siri also ask for confirmation and tells you if its not sure, which lets face it people often aren't so good at. Here is an interesting video clip comparing Microsoft's TellMe on Windows Phone 7 and Siri.
More articles are also appearing about the Apple iTV, which is rumoured to be in production in China. The addition of Siri to this as the primary means of interfacing with a TV could be amazingly powerful, which I've been predicting here since mid October.
As people get more used to the new iPhone 4S it seems that Siri, as I predicted back in early October in this blog, is becoming the stand out feature. People are reportedly buying the new iPhone 4S just because of Siri and some commentators are hailing a new revolution in how we interact with computers. By far the best article I've read about Siri is called Why is Siri important? by Brian Roemmele in Quora.com. In it he traces the origin of Siri back 40 years to DARPA funded work at SRI and describes how SIRI works in a better way than any other (non-technical) writer I've come across. Of particular relevance to people who are developing iOS apps is this excerpt: "Once one really understands how people will use Siri it is not too hard to see that quite a number of very popular apps and sadly some business plans may become redundant or perhaps less useful. The new model may not be apps as much as structured Cloud APIs to deliver data to Siri. Over time it is perhaps easy to see the ecosystem that will develop around Siri and the APIs that are allowed to connect. I am not at all predicting the end of apps as we know it in any way or form. However I am predicting that we will see a Darwinian adaption to the new ecosystem Siri will create. It will be of very high importance to see this trend developing and adjust business models accordingly. Perhaps the opportunities that will be available for Siri backend cloud APIs may be as large as the opportunity the iTunes app store has created."
The rumours have been flying ever since Apple bought the AI company Siri that they were going to put an intelligent assistant in iOS devices that used voice recognition. Well the rumours were true, but more on that later. First a quick comment on the hardware. Apple invited selected journalists to their Infinite Loop campus today for a event titled "Let's Talk iPhone."After lots of stats of how many billions of songs and Apps have been downloaded, how Apple dominates its markets etc...the new iPhone 4S was unveiled. So many forecasters and "Apple insiders" have egg on their face today - where's the iPhone 5 they were all predicting? Personally I always thought that just as with the iPhone 3 the next release would be an "S" model. The form factor of the iPhone 4 is relatively new (and IMHO gorgeous), why would Apple want to make it obsolete so fast? The new 4S has a faster processor, a better camera, some tweaks to the antennae and that's about it. We'll see the iPhone 5 next year. Once again though the important announcement was the software. Tim Cook, the new CEO, at the start of the event said: "Today we're going to be learning about innovations in software and hardware, and the integration of all of these into a "powerful yet simple integrated experience." This perfectly captures Apples ethos - an iintegrated experience, which only they can deliver since only they design and manufacture both the hardware and the software. All their competitors do one or the other and have to team up to do both. So back to Apple's new Intelligent Assistant. This has been a dream of Apple's for a very long time. Way back in 1987 they released a concept video of what they called the Knowledge Navigator. This was an intelligent personal assistant that used voice recognition. You can watch one of the series of videos below.
Siri was a company spun out of the CALO “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes” project funded by the US DARPA programme. This was a huge AI research project that ran for five years involving more than 300 researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions in the US. It's goal was “building a new generation of cognitive assistants that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.” Sounds useful. When Apple bought Siri, many people said Apple have bought a search company, but Steve Jobs always said that they'd bought an AI company. Jobs said in a 2010 interview "[Siri is] not a search company. They're an AI company. We have no plans to go into the search business. We don't care about it -- other people do it well." Jobs believes passionately that for too long we've adapted our behaviour to interface with our computers. Touch is our native way of manipulating our environment hence the iPhone and iPad. But, speech is our natural form of communication, and consequently we should be talking to our devices. Apple may have stolen another lead on the competition through their acquisition of Siri and into integration into iOS 5. Siri launched there own iPhone app which ran on the 3GS, but, by there own admission, there was barely enough processing power and they had to implement several shortcuts (you can read an interview with Siri's co founder Norman Winarsky here). Apple have waited until the hardware (i.e., the iPhone 4 and their new cloud infrastructure) is fully capable of running the Assistant. I don't expect this to be available on the 3GS. Winarsky says that apps like Google Voice are "partial AI" but that Siri is "real AI." He believes that "We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift. It reminds me of another SRI Project: Doug Engelbart, Inventor of Mouse augmented human ability back in the ’60s. Just as Steve Jobs took that technology and ran with it, we believe that Apple will use Siri to start another revolution."
