Apple's Knowledge Navigator - are we there yet?

Like many Apple users I'm keen to see how an upgraded Siri, rumoured to be coming this year, works. Right now Siri is way behind competing speech handling agents. It can turn lights on and off just fine but ask it anything more and it either searches the Internet or asks ChatGPT.

Back in 1987, Apple published a ground breaking vision for how human computer interaction might work in the future. It was commissioned by then CEO, John Sculley, and it not only predicted AI agents but even the Internet.

This morning I was chatting with SmartFriend™ Tony about Clawdbot/Moltbot and he mentioned Knowledge Navigator. We are now very close to this futuristic vision. Not quite there, but it is within reach. ChatGPT helped me create this feature list.

Achieved:

• Voice-activated assistants
• Retrieving and summarising information
• Video calls and collaboration
• Making and managing calls/messages
• Touchscreens and tablets
• Text-to-speech and speech-to-text

Not as envisaged:

• We don't use an animated person's head as our assistant - probably for the best

Not quite here yet:

• Deep contextual long-term assistant memory - Apple announced this two years ago but didn't ship
• Fully autonomous, multi-step tasks with actions - Agents promise this.

What a remarkable vision of the future Sculley and Apple published almost 40 years ago. I hope the Siri team is taking a look.