12 ms·

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late

244 points by planb 15y ago

breckinloggins 15y ago
Putting aside the dated hardware (and hairstyles!), this technology is still a ways off. Yes, Siri is a good start, but it doesn't come anywhere near the type of conversational fluency and contextual awareness that the virtual assistant in this video does. Honestly, I think we're still 10 or 20 years out from that.
- jff 15y ago
  The great AI promise, huh? "True conversational AI is about 10-20 years away" :)
  - ebiester 15y ago
    We're frustratingly close on voice recognition, and I know people using computers for day to day dictation. The interesting thing is that the problem is training and practice, not algorithmic, and Google's wrapping that up now. (As far as I can tell, they're on the forefront of computational linguistics.) We have the ability to parse out questions and return answers at the level of Jeopardy champions with Watson. Today, Watson would have been #113 on the supercomputer 500. In 2005, it would have been #3. #113 in 2005 was a cluster of 1024 Xeon 2.4Ghz. I hate doing apples to oranges, but the only comparison I could find was from cpubenchmark.net, which puts the Xeon 2.5ghz as 381 on their propriatary PassMark. A $335 E3-1275 runs a 9,109 with 4 cores. That's back of the napkin 20-25 times faster. Let's go with 20, extrapolate and say within six years a n equivalent 64-processor machine would be sufficient for Watson-level performance, well within the range of an individual lab, with "good-enough" voice recognition! The last piece here is conversational flow. Chatbots have demonstrated that we're nowhere near yet. That's algorithmic as much as anything, but it's a pretty big topic in computational linguistics, so I'm hoping we'll have that cracked soon. Expert systems look to be reasonable in 5-10 years with fluency, with conversational AI not far behind. We know what we need. It's not an unknown problem at this point, for the most part.
    - dredmorbius 15y ago
      A large part of Watson's performance on Jeopardy came from its buzzer timing. Most human contestants (at the champion level) know the answers to most the questions. The gamesmanship, according to the all-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in a recent Fresh Air interview (Jennings returned to the show to take on Watson) is in the button press timing. Watson has superb accuracy. The computer actually knew the answers to fewer questions than the humans, but when Watson did know the answers, it always got the buzzer. Helps to pull back the curtain a bit at times. True AI and speech are hard. They're getting good. Scary good at times. There's an Android voice-to-voice translation app I've used to communicate with a Mandarin speaker (I manage just a few phrases). After doing that, I spent about fifteen minutes just staring at my phone and realizing that another huge piece of my future was now my present. And I know the pieces behind it: voice recognition (cloud-assisted), translation, speech synthesis. But it's still mind-bogglingly cool. To me at least. For my kids, probably not so much.
      - jshort 15y ago
        Yes, Watson had a major advantage at buzzing in but he was also capable of understanding or computing the questions. This is significant as the questions on Jeopardy aren't simply x + y = z but contain the complexities of the English language.
      - ebiester 15y ago
        "True" AI is a misnomer, though, and is still far away, as we still don't know what we don't know. But conversational AI? The processing power will be there and we know where the algorithms need to improve, and we have ideas on how to do it. My point was more that we know what's left. That hasn't been the case before the last five years or so.
  - wslh 15y ago
    But wasn't HAL ready on 2001?
    - alanh 15y ago
      Sorry for the off-topic, but you’ve seen that HAL INITIALIZATION FAILED is one of the error codes 2011 builds of Windows 8 spit out? http://cl.ly/3z3t360U203B2g303i3Y http://cl.ly/3z3t360U203B2g303i3Y
      - wslh 15y ago
        But HAL in that context is "Hardware Abstraction Layer.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Heck, some of his comments to the device are vague enough that a typical human wouldn't be 100% sure what the desired information is.
- mindstab 15y ago
  also Siri is a purchased piece of tech, not at all developed by Apple
  - _delirium 15y ago
    And Siri in turn was more or less a commercialization-oriented spinoff of this DARPA-funded project from SRI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO
fady 15y ago
one of the best concepts i've seen from apple. yes, siri does not do all that, but, you certainly can manage most of it with all the apps available..nice find, nice find indeed!
pennig 15y ago
Behold, the power of OpenDoc!
- coob 15y ago
  Xcode 4 really reminds me of OpenDoc, just for dev tools.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
That assistant looks like Bill Nye :-) I wonder if anyone showed this video as prior art in the iPad patent discussion. Perhaps one of the most salient things to learn from this is that people with a vision, and a will, work continually toward that vision even when progress seems non-existent. A solid idea of what you'd like something to look like, elucidated clearly, can help shape products for years until what you imagine can be made real. When I saw Alan Kay talk about the Dynabook at one of Xerox PARC's lecture series I felt that here was a guy who had basically committed to this vision, and was knocking down objections one by one.
- stevejohnson 15y ago
  Ironically, this video was made at the request of one of the CEOs who was booted during Apple's dark period. (Gil Amelio? Edit: See child, it was John Sculley.) Source: Insanely Great. I don't have a copy to look it up in.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    John Sculley. Yes, the one who fired Steve Jobs.
    - stevejohnson 15y ago
      Ah yes, of course. Sculley came to consider himself a visionary and artist, sponsoring a couple of projects like these. I'm not going to attribute the near-attainment of this lofty vision to the guy he fired, but I'm glad it has been brought this far.
rabble 15y ago
The video is a mix of two different videos, one from 1987, and one from 1997. The CyberDog / OpenDoc stuff in the second half is obviously not from the 80's as those projects were created in 1996-1997.
- epaulson 15y ago
  When does it switch from the older video to the newer video? It looked to me like all 5:45 was the same video.
  - Semiapies 15y ago
    Going by the comments there, I believe the blogger updated the video to one with just the older clip, so as not to confuse people.
sp332 15y ago
"maren" here on HN founded http://zirtual.com/ http://zirtual.com/ , so you can get a real human assistant while we wait for the future :)
- primigenus 15y ago
  "Your sensitive stuff is safe with us. Whether it's your email address, or usernames or passwords, your dedicated Zirtual Assistant would rather fall on their sword than divulge any of your sensitive information to internet creepers!" Hmm. Creepy!
doomlaser 15y ago
Except that Siri has been out on the App Store since 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AohzWSkAU7c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AohzWSkAU7c Until today that is. It's been artifically limited to Apple's forthcoming iPhone 4S, and current customers will have the service shut off for them on the 15th.
- Cushman 15y ago
  Wait, really? Apple's main product release is actually a product retraction? Damn. They got some marketing balls.
  - m_eiman 15y ago
    More like a new set of system requirements…
    - Cushman 15y ago
      It's pretty rare on the user end that a forced upgrade necessitates a new machine... It's like they're running a web app on your phone.
- spinchange 15y ago
  I hadn't heard anything about them removing the app from people who already have it. I will find it infuriating if an app I bought almost 2 years ago and still use is suddenly removed because of a marketing decision to tie it exclusively to a new product. It currently works on a 3GS and even on 3G with somewhat less functionality.
  - JeremyBanks 15y ago
    Did you buy it? I thought it was free. Siri's server will be doing down once the 3GS is released.
    - spinchange 15y ago
kinkora 15y ago
They seem to have also invented the concept of "checking-in". See video[1] at 0:38 second mark onwards where he talks about a student checking in at Guatemala. [1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8
joejohnson 15y ago
That's nice and all but this video is not from 1987.. 1997 maybe. The lady at the beginning of the video mentions Yahoo which didn't launch until 1995.
- ljf 15y ago
  Nope def. 1987: http://www.worldcat.org/title/educom-87-keynote-address/oclc/027878535 http://www.worldcat.org/title/educom-87-keynote-address/oclc... At which point in the video do they mention Yahoo? I watched it again and couldn't hear it.
raquo 15y ago
It's sad that we still did not achieve the level smoothness and interoperability imagined in this video. Who cares about talking to the computer. Getting things done is still a bunch of ugly hacks.
larrywright 15y ago
I saw this on VHS when it originally came out, at an Apple user group meeting. I was 15 years old. I remember thinking at the time that it all seemed to far-fetched to become reality. I'm glad I was wrong.
- ubercore 15y ago
  You weren't, really. The reality we have today is far removed from that video. Like, really far removed.
civilian 15y ago
Apple also predicted that moms will still be nagging in 2011! Astounding. :)
mrich 15y ago
Let's not forget that speech recognition has been baked into Android for at least 2 years.
- planb 15y ago
  I really hope Siri is not so much about speech recognition but about "intention recognition". If something like "Text my wife that I'll be home at 8" really works without memorizing the exact phrase, then Siri is not just a voice interface, but indeed a personal assistant. I guess that's why Apple kept the name Siri - so the user thinks of "her" as a personality. That said, I'm very skeptical - has Apple ever added a beta tag to a main features of new hardware?
- tjogin 15y ago
  Sure, and speech recognition has been baked into iOS since at least june of 2010. This isn't merely speech recognition.
ck2 15y ago
Funny how someone mentioned this earlier today on HN and then someone manages to repost it as another entry. But I guess the video is somewhat well known and any voice recognition from Apple will draw it's comparison. Same video posted a year earlier with many more views http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8 What's interesting to me is how slow the UI obviously is - I guess they were trying to make it "realistic" for the time and therefore more believable than instantaneous (or it was a limitation of the software they used to create it). Reminds me of the "Lost in Space" movie where the UI from the future seemed too fast to them.
shubhamgoel 15y ago
insane
speek 15y ago
We took a lot of inspiration from this video over at Zazu (http://getzazu.com http://getzazu.com), it's great to see this video being acknowledged by the HN community!
spiffistan 15y ago
Regardless of the awkwardness of this, it's still incredibly fascinating to see. It's kind of like Google Wave meets FaceTime meets Siri and an Exahertz of AI.

244 points by planb 15y ago

Putting aside the dated hardware (and hairstyles!), this technology is still a ways off. Yes, Siri is a good start, but it doesn't come anywhere near the type of conversational fluency and contextual awareness that the virtual assistant in this video does. Honestly, I think we're still 10 or 20 years out from that.

jff 15y ago
The great AI promise, huh? "True conversational AI is about 10-20 years away" :)
- ebiester 15y ago
  We're frustratingly close on voice recognition, and I know people using computers for day to day dictation. The interesting thing is that the problem is training and practice, not algorithmic, and Google's wrapping that up now. (As far as I can tell, they're on the forefront of computational linguistics.) We have the ability to parse out questions and return answers at the level of Jeopardy champions with Watson. Today, Watson would have been #113 on the supercomputer 500. In 2005, it would have been #3. #113 in 2005 was a cluster of 1024 Xeon 2.4Ghz. I hate doing apples to oranges, but the only comparison I could find was from cpubenchmark.net, which puts the Xeon 2.5ghz as 381 on their propriatary PassMark. A $335 E3-1275 runs a 9,109 with 4 cores. That's back of the napkin 20-25 times faster. Let's go with 20, extrapolate and say within six years a n equivalent 64-processor machine would be sufficient for Watson-level performance, well within the range of an individual lab, with "good-enough" voice recognition! The last piece here is conversational flow. Chatbots have demonstrated that we're nowhere near yet. That's algorithmic as much as anything, but it's a pretty big topic in computational linguistics, so I'm hoping we'll have that cracked soon. Expert systems look to be reasonable in 5-10 years with fluency, with conversational AI not far behind. We know what we need. It's not an unknown problem at this point, for the most part.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    A large part of Watson's performance on Jeopardy came from its buzzer timing. Most human contestants (at the champion level) know the answers to most the questions. The gamesmanship, according to the all-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in a recent Fresh Air interview (Jennings returned to the show to take on Watson) is in the button press timing. Watson has superb accuracy. The computer actually knew the answers to fewer questions than the humans, but when Watson did know the answers, it always got the buzzer. Helps to pull back the curtain a bit at times. True AI and speech are hard. They're getting good. Scary good at times. There's an Android voice-to-voice translation app I've used to communicate with a Mandarin speaker (I manage just a few phrases). After doing that, I spent about fifteen minutes just staring at my phone and realizing that another huge piece of my future was now my present. And I know the pieces behind it: voice recognition (cloud-assisted), translation, speech synthesis. But it's still mind-bogglingly cool. To me at least. For my kids, probably not so much.
    - jshort 15y ago
      Yes, Watson had a major advantage at buzzing in but he was also capable of understanding or computing the questions. This is significant as the questions on Jeopardy aren't simply x + y = z but contain the complexities of the English language.
    - ebiester 15y ago
      "True" AI is a misnomer, though, and is still far away, as we still don't know what we don't know. But conversational AI? The processing power will be there and we know where the algorithms need to improve, and we have ideas on how to do it. My point was more that we know what's left. That hasn't been the case before the last five years or so.
- wslh 15y ago
  But wasn't HAL ready on 2001?
  - alanh 15y ago
    Sorry for the off-topic, but you’ve seen that HAL INITIALIZATION FAILED is one of the error codes 2011 builds of Windows 8 spit out? http://cl.ly/3z3t360U203B2g303i3Y http://cl.ly/3z3t360U203B2g303i3Y
    - wslh 15y ago
      But HAL in that context is "Hardware Abstraction Layer.
_delirium 15y ago
Heck, some of his comments to the device are vague enough that a typical human wouldn't be 100% sure what the desired information is.
mindstab 15y ago
also Siri is a purchased piece of tech, not at all developed by Apple
- _delirium 15y ago
  And Siri in turn was more or less a commercialization-oriented spinoff of this DARPA-funded project from SRI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CALO

fady 15y ago

one of the best concepts i've seen from apple. yes, siri does not do all that, but, you certainly can manage most of it with all the apps available..nice find, nice find indeed!

pennig 15y ago

Behold, the power of OpenDoc!

coob 15y ago
Xcode 4 really reminds me of OpenDoc, just for dev tools.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

That assistant looks like Bill Nye :-) I wonder if anyone showed this video as prior art in the iPad patent discussion. Perhaps one of the most salient things to learn from this is that people with a vision, and a will, work continually toward that vision even when progress seems non-existent. A solid idea of what you'd like something to look like, elucidated clearly, can help shape products for years until what you imagine can be made real. When I saw Alan Kay talk about the Dynabook at one of Xerox PARC's lecture series I felt that here was a guy who had basically committed to this vision, and was knocking down objections one by one.

stevejohnson 15y ago
Ironically, this video was made at the request of one of the CEOs who was booted during Apple's dark period. (Gil Amelio? Edit: See child, it was John Sculley.) Source: Insanely Great. I don't have a copy to look it up in.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  John Sculley. Yes, the one who fired Steve Jobs.
  - stevejohnson 15y ago
    Ah yes, of course. Sculley came to consider himself a visionary and artist, sponsoring a couple of projects like these. I'm not going to attribute the near-attainment of this lofty vision to the guy he fired, but I'm glad it has been brought this far.

rabble 15y ago

The video is a mix of two different videos, one from 1987, and one from 1997. The CyberDog / OpenDoc stuff in the second half is obviously not from the 80's as those projects were created in 1996-1997.

epaulson 15y ago
When does it switch from the older video to the newer video? It looked to me like all 5:45 was the same video.
- Semiapies 15y ago
  Going by the comments there, I believe the blogger updated the video to one with just the older clip, so as not to confuse people.

sp332 15y ago

"maren" here on HN founded http://zirtual.com/ http://zirtual.com/ , so you can get a real human assistant while we wait for the future :)

primigenus 15y ago
"Your sensitive stuff is safe with us. Whether it's your email address, or usernames or passwords, your dedicated Zirtual Assistant would rather fall on their sword than divulge any of your sensitive information to internet creepers!" Hmm. Creepy!

doomlaser 15y ago

Except that Siri has been out on the App Store since 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AohzWSkAU7c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AohzWSkAU7c Until today that is. It's been artifically limited to Apple's forthcoming iPhone 4S, and current customers will have the service shut off for them on the 15th.

Cushman 15y ago
Wait, really? Apple's main product release is actually a product retraction? Damn. They got some marketing balls.
- m_eiman 15y ago
  More like a new set of system requirements…
  - Cushman 15y ago
    It's pretty rare on the user end that a forced upgrade necessitates a new machine... It's like they're running a web app on your phone.
spinchange 15y ago
I hadn't heard anything about them removing the app from people who already have it. I will find it infuriating if an app I bought almost 2 years ago and still use is suddenly removed because of a marketing decision to tie it exclusively to a new product. It currently works on a 3GS and even on 3G with somewhat less functionality.
- JeremyBanks 15y ago
  Did you buy it? I thought it was free. Siri's server will be doing down once the 3GS is released.
  - spinchange 15y ago

kinkora 15y ago

They seem to have also invented the concept of "checking-in". See video[1] at 0:38 second mark onwards where he talks about a student checking in at Guatemala. [1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8

joejohnson 15y ago

That's nice and all but this video is not from 1987.. 1997 maybe. The lady at the beginning of the video mentions Yahoo which didn't launch until 1995.

ljf 15y ago
Nope def. 1987: http://www.worldcat.org/title/educom-87-keynote-address/oclc/027878535 http://www.worldcat.org/title/educom-87-keynote-address/oclc... At which point in the video do they mention Yahoo? I watched it again and couldn't hear it.

raquo 15y ago

It's sad that we still did not achieve the level smoothness and interoperability imagined in this video. Who cares about talking to the computer. Getting things done is still a bunch of ugly hacks.

larrywright 15y ago

I saw this on VHS when it originally came out, at an Apple user group meeting. I was 15 years old. I remember thinking at the time that it all seemed to far-fetched to become reality. I'm glad I was wrong.

ubercore 15y ago
You weren't, really. The reality we have today is far removed from that video. Like, really far removed.

civilian 15y ago

Apple also predicted that moms will still be nagging in 2011! Astounding. :)

mrich 15y ago

Let's not forget that speech recognition has been baked into Android for at least 2 years.

planb 15y ago
I really hope Siri is not so much about speech recognition but about "intention recognition". If something like "Text my wife that I'll be home at 8" really works without memorizing the exact phrase, then Siri is not just a voice interface, but indeed a personal assistant. I guess that's why Apple kept the name Siri - so the user thinks of "her" as a personality. That said, I'm very skeptical - has Apple ever added a beta tag to a main features of new hardware?
tjogin 15y ago
Sure, and speech recognition has been baked into iOS since at least june of 2010. This isn't merely speech recognition.

ck2 15y ago

Funny how someone mentioned this earlier today on HN and then someone manages to repost it as another entry. But I guess the video is somewhat well known and any voice recognition from Apple will draw it's comparison. Same video posted a year earlier with many more views http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8 What's interesting to me is how slow the UI obviously is - I guess they were trying to make it "realistic" for the time and therefore more believable than instantaneous (or it was a limitation of the software they used to create it). Reminds me of the "Lost in Space" movie where the UI from the future seemed too fast to them.

shubhamgoel 15y ago

insane

speek 15y ago

We took a lot of inspiration from this video over at Zazu (http://getzazu.com http://getzazu.com), it's great to see this video being acknowledged by the HN community!

spiffistan 15y ago

Regardless of the awkwardness of this, it's still incredibly fascinating to see. It's kind of like Google Wave meets FaceTime meets Siri and an Exahertz of AI.