Computer scientists have been working on some of their underlying technologies for more than half a century — so why can’t Apple make Siri work better? Here’s where virtual assistants came from, where they go wrong, and what the future may hold for them.
At any given time, most of us are within earshot of a virtual assistant. They’re in our pockets, our houses and our cars.
Whether you’re using Apple’s Siri to remind you of an appointment, asking Amazon’s Alexa to play a song for you or consulting the Google Assistant for a local weather report, interacting with these non-human assistants has become normal.
Siri came to the iPhone in 2011, but the underlying technologies are actually older than you might think.
The first machine capable of synthesizing speech was created by Bell Labs 80 years ago in 1939.
In 1952, Bell Labs invented a machine that could understand the spoken numbers 0 through 9. Two years later, in 1954, an IBM machine, in collaboration with linguists at Georgetown, was able to translate 60 Russian sentences into English.
In 1962, IBM created the Shoebox, which could understand 16 spoken words. By 1976, Carnegie Mellon increased that number to over a thousand. And by the mid 1980s, machines could understand tens of thousands of spoken words.
Since then, scientists have started combining these processes with artificial intelligence, a field that itself has been around since the 1950s.
As a result we now have things like Alexa, Siri, the Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana that are able to understand us when we talk.
Artificial intelligence is a big reason computer scientists have been able to make assistants easier to use, but there could be a difference between what you might think of when you hear AI and what it actually means.
« There are two types of AI, » explains Joyce Chai, a professor of computer science and engineering at Michigan State University.
« The strong AI mainly deals with the developing systems that can reason or can think or act like a human. Then the other kind is the weak A. I. which is more focused on specific tasks. And this also includes the virtual assistants. We’re still very far away from strong AI.
