*IDEAorange

If you think the iPad is a new idea think again. Apple cre­ated a con­cept video demon­strat­ing a future device in 1987. That’s right 1987, the Knowl­edge Nav­i­ga­tor. Now that Apple has aquired Siri that vision is much closer to real­ity and Apple may be able to deliver on a promise 23 years in the mak­ing. Siri under­stands that con­text is essential.

Siri’s CTO Tom Gru­ber said : Vir­tual Per­sonal Assis­tants (VPAs) rep­re­sent the next gen­er­a­tion inter­ac­tion par­a­digm for the Inter­net. In today’s par­a­digm, we fol­low links on search results. With a VPA, we inter­act by hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion. We tell the assis­tant what we want to do, and it applies mul­ti­ple ser­vices and infor­ma­tion sources to help accom­plish our task. Like a real assis­tant, a VPA is per­sonal; it uses infor­ma­tion about an individual’s pref­er­ences and inter­ac­tion his­tory to help solve spe­cific tasks, and it gets bet­ter with experience.

Here’s a link to that video.

BTW we wanted to embed but embed­ding has been disabled.