Il Fornaio

D7 Tech Demo: Siri

Oliver J. Chiang in D7 on May 28, 2009 at 12:00 pm PT

Many would-be augurs have been trying to pinpoint the moment the artificial intelligence overlord known as Skynet gets its start: Some may one day point to the launch of Siri. Siri is a virtual personal assistant, for your iPhone or computer, with a pedigree: It originated at the Stanford Research Institute and was spun out as an AI project financed by DARPA. Now, as an alternative to search, Siri is supposed to carry out tasks like finding your next outgoing flight or ordering a pizza by crawling the Web and conversing with the user, processing requests, responding and learning from the interaction. It will do this via a combination of technologies, including speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search.

There's No Biz Like No Biz at Twitter! (And Will Google Swoop In Before It All Comes Crashing Down?)

Kara Swisher in News on February 13, 2009 at 2:41 pm PT

Since BoomTown constantly called the $15 billion valuation of Facebook “insane” when Microsoft forked over $240 million in 2007, and gave Slide’s Max Levchin a very hard time when his widget company got a $550 million valuation a year ago, it’s only fair that I say something equally appropriate about Twitter. The hot microblogging service just got its very own $250 million valuation, but without a dime of revenue in sight. (I know, Bijan, it’s coming, it’s coming!) After all, Facebook and Slide got their funding in boom times and here we are hurtling toward a possible Depression: The Sequel. But I am torn.