Can Siri Understand the Word "Guilty"? Norman Winarsky and Bill Mark Guilty in the Glorification of Groogle

In their article, "The Future of Virtual Personal Assistants," Norman Winarsky and Bill Mark work very hard to set the world back by another 5-10 years, if not longer.  Much longer.

According to them -- both vice presidents at SRA International -- "Siri was a great achievement for Apple and Steve Jobs, helping to introduce virtual personal assistants to millions of consumers, and changing forever the way we view our smartphones."

Apparently, "using speech instead of keyboards to communicate with computers is an old dream, but it took more than thirty years to achieve the robustness and performance needed to make speech systems practical for consumers."

Those 30 years have been terribly misspent.  In fact, Siri may be the biggest example of Groogle ever concocted.  The idea that we need smart-phones to understand our speech, when we have people who understand speech, sets us down a course completely opposite to everything we've learned about collective intelligence and the power of knowledge trade and exchange.

If you listen closely to Groogle-speakers, examples of applications are invariably culture specific.  Question and Answer systems are always finding good restaurants in San Francisco (does everyone in this world eat out at restaurants?).  Or, another example heard yesterday, iPhone apps should provide the 5-10 minutes worth of entertainment one requires when sitting at Starbucks.  Huh?

Now listen to this example from Winarsky and Mark:

Lisa: “Nina, I need a new purse.”
Nina: “Great! Do you want to buy something from Michael Kors like you did last time?”
Lisa: “Well, I’d like Michael Kors, but I don’t want to spend more than $400.”
Nina: “Last time you bought your Michael Kors purse from Nordstrom. Nordstrom has a Michael Kors sale right now…here are some purses you might like.”
Lisa: “I like the chocolate brown one, at $329. Is that the best price you found?”
Nina: “I saw a couple of offers at $310 from other retailers, but their return policy isn’t as generous as Nordstrom’s.”
Lisa” “Okay, let’s go with Nordstrom”.

Winarsky and Mark claim that VPA (Virtual Personal Assistant) technology is "the most elegant and effective way we have figured out yet for humans and machines to interact." 

The key words here are "we have figured out."  Groogle appears to have affected their ability to think.  In fact, if we had an award for "Groogle Article of the Year," this article would be a top contender.