To get from Siri to Jarvis, the virtual concierge should have access to your complete medical history, your investments and financial details, and more.Īll of that information may exist online somewhere, and it may be accessible by you-but only in separate silos. The value of the services Google provides are a direct reflection of Google’s ability to deliver relevant information in real-time because it knows where you are, where you’re going, who you know, and what you like.Įven if you trust Google, or Apple, or Microsoft, or whichever company with your information, the next obstacle is getting the various entities that store your personal data to play nicely with each other. The fact is that the more you’re willing to share personal data and sensitive information with Google, the more awesome Google can be for you. The question is, “which cloud?” Do you trust Google more than Apple, or Microsoft more than Google?īack in May, I wrote about Google’s “creepy factor”. We’re just talking about trusting a third party and sharing your personal data with that company. We’re not talking about posting sensitive data publicly on a social network. It’s not a matter of sharing intimate details of your life with the world. It allows your Siri, or Google Now, or “Jarvis” to exist simultaneously on multiple devices and platforms, rather than being held hostage in one gadget. The cloud makes sense because it can store virtually unlimited amounts of data that can be accessed from just about anywhere.
MAK JARVIS PROGRAM FOR ANDROID PORTABLE
Even if it could, that would be a huge privacy and data security concern because portable / mobile gadgets are also very easily lost or stolen. Your device-whether it’s a smartphone or tablet, or some new gadget like a smartwatch or Google Glass-will not have enough built-in storage capacity to remember every detail of your life. Jarvis-or whatever the next-generation virtual concierge is called-will need some way to store and access all of the relevant information about you. There are two elements to this hurdle-which entities you trust to store your data, and the regulatory and privacy regulations that prevent key information from being shared at all. Possibly the biggest hurdle, though, when it comes to moving from Siri to Jarvis is privacy-and our personal and social stigmas about sharing information with a third party. But, it’s not hooked up-and there is an API, by the way, and there is an answer for that on the Internet, but the Siri system is not hooked up to Foursquare, and so it takes you to Bing, and it gives you a stupid answer, and it breaks.” “Siri, even if it understands you-like, you can ask it something like “How many people are checked in at the Ritz on Foursquare?” It understands you. The information may be available, but if Apple doesn’t have an arrangement to allow Siri to access it, it may as well not exist. The virtual assistant-whether it’s Siri, Google, or something else-is just a voice recognition front-end for the databases and computer services it’s connected to. Microsoft, and even Amazon are all working on their own next-generation voice recognition systems. Nuance is sort of the de facto leader in voice recognition, and it’s the technology behind Siri, but Scoble believes Nuance has peaked, and that it doesn’t have the sort of innovation necessary to take us to the next level. He said that if you ask Google Glass to find “500 First Street”, it insists on converting it to “501st Street” which can be problematic for getting around in metropolitan areas that like to use numbers for street names. Scoble told me that Google’s voice recognition suffers from similar issues. For my wife and kids, Siri is even less accurate, sometimes to the point of being unusably dysfunctional.
I have a pretty good success rate with Siri, but I still have to repeat or re-state about 10 percent of the commands, which isn’t very efficient. The first-and possibly biggest-problem, is just developing technology that can actually understand what the hell you’re saying.
Scoble began ominously with, “The problem…so, there’s multiple problems on multiple levels.” Scoble is also co-author of a soon-to-be-released book titled Age of Context (co-written by Forbes contributor Shel Israel), and he is an avid-possibly rabid-proponent of the benefits of sharing personal information.įrom the very start of our conversation, it didn’t sound like we’re going to get Jarvis anytime soon. He claims Siri was launched in his house, and he is in a unique, and enviable position to peek behind the curtains and see what the future wizards of Silicon Valley are working on. Granted, Scoble isn’t personally working on the technology that will get us there, but he talks to the people who are.