The Digital Consultant: VPA's and the State of the Twitterverse

Wednesday, 5 October 2011

VPA's and the State of the Twitterverse

There is a buzz of excitement around the release of the next iPhone and it is not all to do with the hardware. In tandem with the release Apple will be launching their new artificial intelligence Assistant.

This software has evolved from Siri Personal Assistant and VPA's (Virtual Personal Assistants) will change for ever the way we use our smart devices.

Siri co-founder Norman Winarsky was recently interviewed by 9TO5Mac:

“Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I’d go so far as to say it is a world-changing event.”

“This is real AI with real market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL (personal assistant software) will get things done, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift.”

The critical advantage of the iPhone Assistant is that it will learn; what food you like, what restaurants you like to go to, the taxi numbers to get to those restaurants, which app to use, as well as performing web searches and transcribing your texts.

Meanwhile on the social media front, Twitter goes from strength to strength. Three recent infographics which give an updated overview of Twitter activity.