iPhone 4S, Siri and the old Knowledge Navigator

The iPhone 4S is set for Kiwi release - so we can talk to Siri. But will she listen? Photo / Supplied

I vaguely remember this from back in the day - Apple's device that was going to be a personal computer assistant. I remember thinking it looked like some kind of far-fetched medical device for rich people, and that it might be possible for a few to own such a thing, but it was extremely unlikely I'd ever get to use anything like it, as a member of the lower classes.

One introduction of the concept was a video with classical music playing in a pretty plush-looking academic environment. A man walks in and opens a device upon which a screen instantly springs to life. This pad-thing starts talking, listing what notifications have arrived, and the man talks back to this thing, asking what appointments he has. It's kinda funny, as the screen of this postulated device has a little talking head figurine on it, and he's wearing a bow tie.

Check out this video and you'll see what I mean.

The presentation comes complete with titling in Apple's typical long-lived typeface - a custom version of Garamond, compressed around 80 per cent. I remember when I worked for a Mac magazine, Apple would get sniffy if you ever compressed Garamond in a spread to look like Apple's version. (Apple's typeface shifted mostly to the less-fussy Myriad in 2002.)

Anyway, back to this device thingy. It was more like a digital butler in tablet form than a computer, and Apple produced several concept videos showcasing the concept. But the thing did boast a text-to-speech system plus speech recognition, and a gesture-based interface predating the actuality of an iPad by over two decades - this was 1987. Indeed, it showcased the genesis of the multitouch interface later introduced on the first iPhone.

As many commentators rightly pointed out, the Knowledge Navigator - as it was actually referred to, rather than 'thingy' - also predated Siri, the spoken interface that's available in the iPhone 4S.

I know Apple is, or was, often lambasted for being too expensive, but Siri and the iPhone, and iPad for that matter, have strayed far from the cloistered realms of well-heeled academics and the wealthy. Thank goodness.

And iDevices have not only been widely adopted, but widely emulated for mass consumption.

But if you ever wondered about how far ahead Apple has a roadmap, the Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) pointed out that the scenario in the 1987 concept video actually takes place far away in the future.

In September 2011 - which is spookily close to the actual October 4, 2011 announcement of the iPhone 4S with Siri.

In the linked video, it you look at the date on the professor's calendar it says September 16, and he's looking for a five-year-old article (published in 2006).

Apple was a month out on a projection of a capability it placed 24 years in the future.

But in fact, it appears Steve Jobs always had something like a Knowledge Navigator/iPad in mind when he introduced the Mac, and was steadily working towards it his whole career. The Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told a gathering in Santa Clara for Storage Networking World (a conference) that Jobs likely wanted an ultra-simple computer "from the day we started Apple", back in the late 1970s, but that technical reality had meant it was impractical. Until now. Technology had to catch up to create the ease of use he wanted.

"We had to go through a lot of steps where you connected to things, and (eventually) computers grew up to where they could do ... normal consumer appliance things," he explained.

He went on to stress that the iPad's design was for 'normal people' who didn't necessarily understand or care about the same features engineers and IT geeks did.

Wozniak is a fascinating character in his own right. He was a top maths student who once got called into the principal's office in 12th grade, expecting to be given yet another maths prize. However, it was for a fake bomb made from an electronic ticker he'd made then left in a school locker as a joke (yeah, not very funny). He duly spent the night in a cell, where he showed other inmates how to route the ceiling-fan wires to the steel bars to shock anyone who touched them. Er, LOL?

Meanwhile, Siri has sparked a YouTube genre of question-and-answer sessions that range from hilarious to just weird, including even sung duets. Just type Siri into YouTube's search.

That's because Siri has been cleverly programmed with all sorts of smart answers to questions you may not thinking of asking your iPhone 4S, first off, anyway.

For example, if you ask Siri, the spoken virtual personal assistant on the iPhone 4S, why it's so great, it answers "I am what I am."

But as for the rest, just how well it will work here in distant New Zealand is anyone's guess, although anyone with one here, purchased overseas for example, might already know.

In the US, when you ask Siri to find a nearby restaurant, Siri uses speech recognition to deal with the request and then sends the question to the cloud, where a powerful artificial intelligence algorithm can analyse the wording, figure out what exactly you want, and send the answer back to your phone.

Siri dutifully follows through and searches for, say, a nearby pizzeria. Even three years ago, this kind of cloud-based analysis wasn't possible. We're just starting to explore what we can do with the technology, but as to how that's supported Down Under, we still await our 4S moment in the sun. Or under a cloud, anyway.

(Macworld has more on Siri and the cloud here.)

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com