The history of the user’s interaction with a modern computer essentially begins with the keyboard. After DOS came the introduction of the Windows-style GUI, and the mouse was introduced to move the cursor around the display screen and make selections. With the onset of tablet computing, touching the display directly became possible and is now the big "craze".
Speech recognition software has been around for some time, but it never caught on because the interface felt unnatural and required a lot of effort on the user’s part. IBM’s ViaVoice effort in the late 90s would have been more widely accepted had it not required that you train it for at least 45 minutes to understand your diction, and then you had to pause…between…words when you tried to use it.
Even if you had been able to get it to understand you–it was designed to work for dictation. There wasn’t software designed to direct the computer to perform a task or function.
Enter Siri, the revolutionary Intelligent Assistant that communicates normally with its user. It’s pretty simple really–you hold down the Home button, after you hear the tones you ask Siri what you want it to do, or what you need to know.
Imagine if you never had to type in a search box again, or fill in forms to book travel or buy products. Search engines fall by the wayside because you can just talk to your computer assistant, who knows everything he needs to know about you anyway, so he can “fill in those forms” (call APIs) for you. In this world, you talk to your computer, and it does whatever you need it do. You don’t need to actually go find the website yourself. You just ask your phone/computer/device and it does the actual thing you would have done on that website anyway.
In this world, the Internet is a radically different beast. No longer is it important to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to ensure your company gets a high up ranking in search results, no longer is it important to drive traffic to your site (or at least, it’s only important for brand awareness/selection, not for performing e-commerce activities themselves).
Instead, what becomes far more important is making sure that people who need your service, or who could benefit from it, get it presented as an option by their digital assistant. If the assistant doesn’t know about it, you lose business. Suddenly companies no longer optimize for Google, but for Apple – or whoever else launches intelligent agent software. Companies like Apple becomes the gatekeeper of a new way to shop and do business online (however you might feel about that).
A nice side-effect of this is that in order for services to compete and describe themselves to intelligent agents, new standards for describing information and services have to be adopted. Finally, there is a business reason for the semantic web standards that exist to today to be adopted, developed and unified. Because in an Internet tailored for agents, not having a standardized, linked data, open graph type API will leave your business out in the cold.
Siri is important because it is the first consumer product to take us on the long road towards this world. It represents the beginning of a new paradigm of computing, a vastly more useful way for people to get what they need from computers, and the real beginning of a commercial, competitive semantic web.
Also, because it’s voice activated, yet offers so many advantages over just typing keywords, Siri may finally create the tipping point to encourage people to stop feeling silly/self-conscious about using voice control – because the rewards outweigh the risk of feeling silly. Could this be the beginning of real-world large-scale public usage of voice-driven computing?What so many critics of Siri fail to understand is its potential–but even more importantly, the potential of the technology behind it. There’s no doubt that it will change and evolve significantly as time moves on, and others will develop similar–perhaps better–technology. Think about that: the poorly sighted, the handicapped, those suffering from debilitating conditions like strokes…even those who don’t understand the language–all of these can utilize an intelligent assistant like Siri.
All of this is why Siri is important. It’s a “Google” moment. And Apple – the Microsoft of the 2010s – is in charge of it.
The excitement for me when Siri was announced was that the fourth method of communication had finally been achieved. You need only speak to your device and it understands you. No keyboard, mouse or other obsolete interface required