Order your Virtual Personal Assistant around with your voice

There are a lot of services planned for the semantic web (SemWeb), many of which are not about the human interface. The SemWeb is supposed to be optimized for data to interact and for machines to interact, but at some point, it must deliver value to humans or we won't build them.

'Agent' is used to describe an action such as conduct a search, make a reservation, buy tickets... Examples of more complex actions may be to infer your intent and initiate a series of actions now and in the future based on a set of contextual conditions, like a sell order to your stock broker.

Wouldn't it be great to have a digital personal assistant that understands your intent, in the correct context, that will continuously learn who you are, your preferences and decision criteria, and slave away endlessly without taking offense even when you're surly and not politically correct?

Here's a 43:18 minute video in which Tom Gruber of Siri explains a lot, at great length, and gives a great demo. It is worth your time and attention. Siri is an iPhone app launched in mid-2009 and is 'free.' It's not 'real' artificial intelligence, not 'real' natural language... but still quite compelling. Tom will explain.

KEYNOTE: The Game Changer: Siri, a Virtual Personal Assistant from Semantic Universe on Vimeo.