This document provides an overview of Siri, Apple's virtual assistant. It describes Siri as an intelligent personal assistant for the iOS that uses voice recognition and natural language processing to answer questions. The document outlines Siri's capabilities, such as providing personalized answers about weather, directions, events and more by accessing sources like Yahoo Local. It also discusses how Siri works through speech recognition, language processing, and by interfacing with third-party APIs. Limitations and the future of improving Siri through greater personalization and connectivity are also covered.

1. Siri
Voice controlled Virtual Assistant
Haroon Rashid
Mithun Bose
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2. Overview
Introduction
Siri vs. Search
How Siri works?
Siri Limitations
Future of Siri
References
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3. • Siri is an iOS application.
• An Intelligent personal assistant
• Knowledge navigator
• Uses speech recognition and
offers personalized answers to
questions about the weather,
directions, movies, etc
3
What is Siri?
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4. Demo
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5. Sources of information
• Yahoo Local
• TaxiMagic
• MovieTickets
• WeatherBug
• TrueKnowledge.com
• Citysearch
• OpenTable
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Wolfram Alpha
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6. Siri Intelligence/Learning
• Improved intelligence software
• Utilizes voice recognition technology
• Understands the context of the search
• Geo-located search
• Remembers preferences over time
• Intended to be used on the go.
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7. Siri vs. Search
• Focused on completing tasks for you, not finding raw pages
• Derives user intent through conversation with the user,
instead of just keywords
• Targets your particular interests and personality
• Siri focuses on a few important vertical domains
–Restaurants, bars, movies, events, local business, weather, and
services
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8. How Siri started
AI - assistants have been the dream of technologists for a long time,
but they weren't very feasible until recently.
They have finally been made more so by things like much
 faster wireless speeds,
 more powerful processors (especially those in our mobile devices),
 the availability of vast amounts of data for training the AI,
 the advent of cloud computing
 and improvements in speech recognition methodologies.
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9. How Siri Works
Using ASR (Automatic speech recognition) to transcribe human
speech into text.
 short utterances of commands,
 questions, or
 Dictations.
Using natural language processing it translates transcribed text into
"parsed text".
 part of speech tagging,
 noun-phrase chunking,
 dependency & constituent parsing
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10. How Siri Works
Using question & intent analysis to
 analyze parsed text,
 detecting user commands and actions.
 Ex: "Schedule a meeting", "Set my alarm", ...
Using data mashup technologies to interface with 3rd-party web
services such as
 OpenTable,
WolframAlpha, to perform actions, search operations, and question
answering
 Question utterances, that it cannot directly answer, will be forwarded.
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11. How Siri Works
Transforming output of 3rd party web services back into natural
language text
 Ex: Today's weather report -> "The weather will be sunny“
Using TTS (text-to-speech) technologies to
 transform the natural language text to synthesized speech.
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12. Siri Limitations
• Cannot handle general knowledge or tasks outside of its focus areas
• Cannot do complex planning and purchasing
• Takes a while to learn your preferences
• Voice recognition software has flaws
• Because Siri is interacting with servers on the cloud,
• WiFi or cellular connectivity is necessary.
• Siri also won't work very well if you end up in an area with weak
cellular service.
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13. Future of Siri
• Siri is an early prototype of the next generation search engine
• Siri may change user expectation of search
• Personalizes search – remembers over time
• Greater importance for local search
• Rise of partnerships among APIs
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14. References
1. http://www.apple.com/ios/siri/?cid=oas-us-domains-siri.com
2. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/
siri.htm
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri
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15. Thanks!
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