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Innovation: How far can you trust an AI assistant?

Innovation is our regular column that highlights emerging technological ideas and asks where they may lead.

Welcome to the future: people in the US can now carry an artificial intelligence around in their pocket, where it waits patiently to be told what to do.

Siri, an iPhone app that understands spoken commands and uses the web to carry them out, is a spin-off from a US military project to develop an artificially intelligent assistant.

Many people's experience of a "virtual assistant" may be limited to Microsoft's annoying classic Mr Clippy. But in the week we spent together, my AI assistant has performed admirably in finding me restaurants, or the location of the nearest coffee shop. It wasn't even stumped when I asked "do I need my umbrella today?" coming straight back with the local weather forecast.

Help me out here

A typical command might be: "Reserve a table for two at a good French restaurant in San Francisco." Siri responds by presenting a list of top-rated restaurants that can be booked on If you say which time you want, it can book you a table without your lifting a finger.

In some ways Siri is just a fancy front-end to the 35 sites it can connect to, from taxi booking sites to movie review databases. But what's new is the way it can decode the intentions of its master or mistress and use those sites to put them into action.

Doing that requires the ability to actually understand the meaning of words you use, not just passing on keywords blindly, says Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer.

"Book a four-star restaurant in Boston seems pretty straightforward," says Cheyer, "until you realise that Book is a city in the US, and Star is also a city in the US, and there are 13 Bostons, and Star is also the name of a restaurant."

Interpretation explosion

To cut through what Cheyer calls the "combinatorial explosion of interpretations", Siri uses your location, and the history of the commands you've given. It knows that "book" is most likely a command verb, unless you happen to be near the city of Book.

Siri attaches probabilities to the interpretation of each word and cross-references with your location and other data, some of which you must provide yourself.

To send email reminders, Siri obviously needs to know your email address. To "find me the flower shop closest to work", it needs to know where you work. To pay bills or buy airline tickets, features planned for future releases, it would need access to your credit card.

Can I trust you?

That raises the question of how far we are willing to trust a piece of software that can go and do things for us based on what it "thinks" we mean, a topic that occupies some engineers working on artificial intelligence. The more data, and power, you give your virtual assistant, the more damage it could do.

Siri may be simple, and always shows its interpretation of a command before carrying it out. But it gives users a preview of a new balance between privacy, trust and convenience that the expansion of AI into everyday life is likely to engender.

"Do I tell it my home?" says Cheyer. "That's a little creepy. But then I can say 'find me a restaurant near my home' and it will understand."

Siri's creators are wise to move cautiously, starting with entertainment services and other non-critical tasks. Future, more competent versions, may prompt a little soul-searching from users.

Read previous Innovation columns: The relentless rise of the digital worker, What use is a smartbook?, The sinister powers of crowdsourcing, Making a map for everyone, by everyone, Where next for social networking?, The dizzying ambition of Wolfram Alpha, Can technology persuade us to stop trashing the planet?, You Facebook, you Tweet, now lifelog, The psychology of Google Wave.



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