Emerging technology TR1: Intelligent Software Assistant

The largest Artificial Intelligence research project in history, funded by the U.S. military, has spun a new consumer product called Siri. Selected by MIT Tech Review’s 10 Emerging Technologies of 2009, Siri is a personal virtual assistant. There goal is to change the way people interact with the internet and gather information. Rather than a search engine, MIT Tech Review calls Siri a “do engine” (http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&id=22117).
This virtual assistant will help you get things done faster on the internet. A user will no longer be bogged down with the time consuming tasks of filling out forms, copying, and collecting data on the internet. Many of the things that today people really on personal assistants to do, virtual assistants will be able to do. Currently the only people that have access to or can afford personal assistants are executives. Siri will virtually extend the power of a personal assistant to the public (http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1102012475648).
Adam Cheyer, former member of the DARPA funded Kalo Project (http://www.darpa.mil/), is the cofounder of Silicon Valley based startup company, Siri. The system is able to account for the users context, making it much more useful than a search engine. In an interview with the MIT Tech Review, Cheyer says "In order to get a system that can act and reason, you need to get a system that can interact and understand...". I believe that is what distinguishes Siri from qualitative based search engines, and makes it a break through technology.
I have a personal affinity for this company as the company I am starting as my development project has a mission statement of “...improving peoples lifestyles through technological innovation.” Siri does exactly that. I’ve always imagined being able to harness the powers of the tools and information on the internet in an automated way, so instead of spending the majority of my time reading through search engine results to find information, I could spend that time creating new results with the information.