Siri is a Virtual Personal Assistant – a new way to interact with the Internet on your mobile phone. Like a real assistant, Siri helps you get things done. You interact with Siri by just saying, in your own words, what you want to do. You can ask Siri to find a romantic place for dinner, and get reservations for Saturday night. You can discover things to do over the weekend, get tickets to the movies, or call a cab when you’re out on the town. You don’t have search through a bunch of web pages, following links and hunting down facts. Siri does all the work giving you the information you need at your fingertips.
We believe that in five years most people who use the Internet will have a Virtual Personal Assistant (VPA) to take care of the details of using online services. We will look back at the birth of VPA’s in 2009 and wonder how we ever got by without our trusted assistant. The days of wading through links and pages from your mobile interface will seem quaint, because the natural way to interact with the rich world of information and services is to have a conversation. As John Batelle, the author of The Search, says “The future of search is a conversation with someone we trust.” Siri is just getting started, and has a lot to learn. Stay tuned – the era of the personal assistant has begun!
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