Now, SRI International, the research institute, is hoping to bring the concept of virtual personal assistants closer to reality — without the malevolent malfunctions, of course.
“We are looking to augment human capability,” said Norman Winarsky, vice president for licensing and strategic programs at SRI. “But with artificial intelligence.”
Established in 1946 by Stanford University, SRI created early prototypes of the computer mouse and the technologies involved in ultrasound and HDTV.
Although SRI does roughly 80 percent of its work for the federal government, many of its technologies have been adapted for commercial purposes. Recently, the institute has set its sights on the mobile phone and Web market, especially on creating applications that perform personal functions.
“We have companies in every space: drug discovery, flexible circuits, new medical devices, solar, clean tech,” said Mr. Winarsky, who oversees the establishment of new companies that are spun off from SRI. “But right now, half of the companies we’re thinking of creating are strongly related to virtual personal assistants.”
SRI’s newest venture is a Web-based personalized news feed, Chattertrap, that monitors what people are reading to learn what they like, and then serves up articles and links that suit their interests.
Another recent project is a mobile application, Siri, that allows people to perform Web searches by voice on a cellphone. Siri users can speak commands like “find a table at an Italian restaurant for six at 8 tonight,” and the application can translate the request and use GPS functions and search algorithms to find an answer.
Siri’s software is sophisticated enough that over time, it can even remember if someone prefers places that serve Northern Italian cuisine, rather than Sicilian, and make recommendations around that preference.
The application has already been a big hit; in April, Apple acquired Siri for a price said to be as high as $200 million. But some analysts wonder whether SRI will be able to duplicate this kind of success. Variations on the virtual personal assistant concept have been around for a while. Two services, for example — Remember the Milk and Jott — are types of electronic crutches intended to help users be more efficient at ticking off items in their daily to-do lists.
But SRI is betting that its expertise in artificial intelligence will help make software that can break away from the pack. And it has high hopes that Chattertrap will be as successful as Siri.
“The popular news sites aren’t always the most interesting,” said Gary Griffiths, one of the two entrepreneurs SRI recruited to guide Chattertrap. “But by using technology to evolve with you as you use it, watching what you’re doing and giving more of what you like and less of what you’re ignoring, we can create a very personal information service.”
Although Chattertrap is in a limited test period right now, the company hopes to allow more users later this summer and release the product in its entirety by the end of the year.
Chattertrap has already caught the eye of Li Ka-shing, a Chinese billionaire who has invested in Facebook and the music-streaming service Spotify. Mr. Li recently led a $1.5 million round of venture financing in the Chattertrap project.
SRI’s newfound interest in mobile and Web applications was born, in part, from a research project commissioned by the Defense Department to develop software that can learn, in an effort to create a more efficient way for the military to communicate and stay organized in the field. The project’s underlying technology, a combination of adaptive machine learning and natural-language processing, has spawned several offshoots.
Each year, SRI tests the marketability of roughly 2,000 technology ventures, but typically only three or four are ever established as independent businesses.
Charles S. Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research who follows the mobile industry, said SRI was tapping into the mobile market at a time when the need to simplify searching is greater than ever.
“The old paradigm of having a desktop computer in front of you with a large screen to search around for what you want is going away,” Mr. Golvin said. “More and more, the information you want online is coming from the palm of your hand.”
Since most mobile phones have small, cramped screens and tiny keyboards, voice-activated search and speech recognition become much more powerful, Mr. Golvin said.
“It’s a very compelling offer for a mobile company,” he said.
In addition, companies like Apple and Google are sizing up the market opportunity for location-based search and the potential advertising opportunities that come with it, said Brent Iadarola, director of mobile research at Frost & Sullivan.
“The acquisition that Apple has made provides powerful clues as to what the mobile landscape will look like in the future,” Mr. Iadarola said.
“When you’re in a mobile environment there’s a higher propensity to spend, and tying that into mobile advertising could be lucrative.”
Still, he said, it’s not clear yet whether SRI can recreate the same type of successes it had with Siri with its future virtual personal assistants. “That was hitting it out of the ballpark, in my opinion,” he said. “I don’t know if they can replicate that.”
Mr. Winarsky said the intellectual property licensed to Apple as part of the acquisition of Siri is a fraction of what has been generated by the institute.
“Siri is the first and in some cases, the simplest, of what we’ll do,” he said.
Mr. Winarsky said SRI was in the early stages of determining what will be the next start-up to become an independent company.
One area he is particularly excited about is translation, he said.
“Virtually every industry and platform has a need for translation services,” he said.
In addition, he said, a virtual personal assistant could be of great use to the health industry and patients, by helping figure out which procedures are covered by insurance or quickly finding and booking a doctor’s appointment.
“We’ll only be able to tell in 20 years,” he said. “But I truly believe this is the dawn of a new era of artificial intelligence. It is on the vanguard of a great revolution in computer science.”
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