KnowledgeNavigator
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Thoughts on why Siri isn't on the new iPad
When the predictions were running wild about the new iPad's features, most pundits believed that the new device would come with Siri. After all, the intelligent assistant has been on the iPhone 4S since October 2011, providing both useful information and help as well as hours of entertainment. Time Magazine's Matt Peckham believes that Apple left Siri off of the new iPad for one very good reason -- Siri isn't ready for it. Peckham brings up one point that I made before the announcement of the new iPad; does the iPad really need Siri? After all, the iPad is not a device that you have with you all of the time, and you're most likely not going to whip it out to ask questions like "Where's a good Thai restaurant near here?" Instead, with an iPad you'll be most likely checking email, visiting websites, or reading an ebook -- not exactly something you'd need Siri's help for. In his post, Peckham hopes that Apple is "working on something more sophisticated for the iPad in terms of natural language interchange." As he mentions, "what we need is a truly semantic application, capable of understanding long-form sentences, that can 'get to know' us over time and adjust to our personality [sic] inflections or eccentricities." Sam Biddle at Gizmodo followed up on this stream of consciousness, noting that a Siri-enabled iPad "could genuinely think with us ... Imagine starting a term paper while Siri looks up a list of Latin American countries that underwent a revolution in the 20th century, sorted by current GDP? Imagine asking Siri to pluck out every photo of your parents at your brother's wedding, auto-enhance, and resize to something proper for email, all in one utterance." In other words, Siri for the iPad would be the equivalent of the assistant in the seminal Apple Knowledge Navigator video of 1987. There's a long way to go before the current beta version of Siri would be capable of performing tasks of this sort. At least we're seeing the early fruits of Apple's labors on the iPhone 4S, and the new iPad will make life somewhat easier (for writers, at least) through its voice dictation feature. As for the Knowledge Navigator capabilities? It's still a bit early, but I'm hopeful that they're going to be here soon.
Daily Update for October 5, 2011
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen.
Apple's Knowledge Navigator, Siri and the iPhone 4S
Back in 1987, Apple produced a concept video describing a product known as Knowledge Navigator. Knowledge Navigator is a computer app with bow-tied personal assistant that would let you interact with your device using your voice and natural language. You can check messages, find appointments, share documents and more. Sound familiar? It should as it's surprisingly similar to Siri, the natural language personal assistant Apple introduced at its iPhone 4S event yesterday. Not only is Knowledge Navigator like Siri, the scenario in the concept video also takes place in September 2011. As Kickstarter's Andy Baio pointed out on Waxy.org, there's a remarkable alignment of the dates here. Look at the date on the professor's calendar; it says September 16 and he's looking for a five-year-old article that was published in 2006. This September 16 date, which was chosen 24 years ago, is eerily close to Apple's October 4, 2011 announcement. Check out the video below, I think you'll enjoy it. Corrected to acknowledge source of the timing comparison.
Did iPad kill the Courier tablet?
Microsoft's Courier project was an exciting and fascinating concept. When it first appeared last year, the folding two-screen tablet was one of the most incredible things we've seen out of Redmond for a long time. Similar in concept to Apple's Knowledge Navigator concept device, Courier used a combination of touch and pen-based computing to generate a lot of buzz and interest about what was going on in Microsoft's labs. Gizmodo is reporting that the project was killed yesterday. There's speculation that the intense popularity of Apple's relatively low-cost iPad, coupled with the imminent arrival of Android-based tablets and possibly even WebOS slates from HP, could have scared the software giant away from releasing the device. Nobody outside of Microsoft knows for sure how far along Courier really was -- the video that was widely distributed last fall was obviously a marketing dream -- or how much the proposed device would have cost. With two iPad-sized touchscreens and a strong, yet lightweight hinge mechanism holding the Courier screens together, it wouldn't have been as inexpensive as the iPad. Although those of us at TUAW are Apple fanboys to the max, we regret that the Courier never made it to market. Competition is good, and when a possible contender fails to make it out of the conceptual stage, it's a loss for all of us.
