PowerPoint Presentation

1 SiriVoice controlled Virtual Assistant2OverviewIntroductionSiri vs. SearchHow Siri works?Siri LimitationsFuture of SiriReferences

3What is Siri?Siri is an iOS application.An Intelligent personal assistantKnowledge navigator

Uses speech recognition and offers personalized answers to questions about the weather, directions, movies, etc

4Demo

5Sources of informationYahoo LocalTaxiMagicMovieTicketsWeatherBugTrueKnowledge.com CitysearchOpenTableRotten TomatoesWolfram Alpha

6Siri Intelligence/LearningImproved intelligence softwareUtilizes voice recognition technologyUnderstands the context of the searchGeo-located search Remembers preferences over timeIntended to be used on the go.

7Siri vs. SearchFocused on completing tasks for you, not finding raw pagesDerives user intent through conversation with the user, instead of just keywordsTargets your particular interests and personalitySiri focuses on a few important vertical domainsRestaurants, bars, movies, events, local business, weather, and services

8How Siri startedAI - assistants have been the dream of technologists for a long time, but they weren't very feasible until recently. They have finally been made more so by things like much faster wireless speeds, more powerful processors (especially those in our mobile devices), the availability of vast amounts of data for training the AI, the advent of cloud computing and improvements in speech recognition methodologies.9How Siri WorksUsing ASR (Automatic speech recognition) to transcribe human speech into text.short utterances of commands, questions, or Dictations.Using natural language processing it translates transcribed text into "parsed text".part of speech tagging, noun-phrase chunking, dependency & constituent parsing10How Siri WorksUsing question & intent analysis to analyze parsed text, detecting user commands and actions. Ex: "Schedule a meeting", "Set my alarm", ...Using data mashup technologies to interface with 3rd-party web services such as OpenTable, WolframAlpha, to perform actions, search operations, and question answering Question utterances, that it cannot directly answer, will be forwarded.

11How Siri WorksTransforming output of 3rd party web services back into natural language text Ex: Today's weather report -> "The weather will be sunny

Using TTS (text-to-speech) technologies to transform the natural language text to synthesized speech.

12Siri LimitationsCannot handle general knowledge or tasks outside of its focus areasCannot do complex planning and purchasingTakes a while to learn your preferencesVoice recognition software has flawsBecause Siri is interacting with servers on the cloud, WiFi or cellular connectivity is necessary. Siri also won't work very well if you end up in an area with weak cellular service.

13Future of SiriSiri is an early prototype of the next generation search engineSiri may change user expectation of searchPersonalizes search remembers over timeGreater importance for local searchRise of partnerships among APIs

14Referenceshttp://www.apple.com/ios/siri/?cid=oas-us-domains-siri.comhttp://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/siri.htmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri

15Thanks!