I think Apple's acquisition Siri has potential - in more ways than one

Siri is all over the Apple news sites today.

I heard that apple purchased this company, Siri, but didn't have a clue as to what it did until I watched this video.  Its a keynote from the Semantic Technology Conference.  It begins with Apple's own vision (from 20 years ago!) of a virtual personal assistant called the "Knowledge Navigator" (video here).  It goes on to describe the challenges of creating a "Virtual Personal Assistant", such as semantical searching, reasoning, speech recognition, NLP, etc. - and presents a method to reel in the problem domain by first filtering on the current context to narrow the domain.  The slides from the keynote are also available.  It seems a practical approach and I look forward to trying it out (I just downloaded it from the App Store).

And I could see where this would fit with Apple's strategy: the iTunes Store, App Store, etc. all provide content and services, like Siri's servers do - and like all of these services, Siri would collect information that's valuable to Apple (and advertisers using its new iAd service).  Siri uses services to make recommendations, and allow commerce based on those recommendations, and it seems reasonable that paid recommendations (ala Google) would make their way into Siri.  And Siri (optionally) has access to your credit cards making it all too easy to engage in a bit of impulse buying.

Interesting.