Large-scale personal assistant technology deployment: the siri experience

Natural language interaction has the potential to considerably enhance user experience, especially in mobile devices like smartphones and electronic tablets. Recent advances in software integration and efforts toward more personalization and context awareness have brought closer the long-standing vision of the ubiquitous intelligent personal assistant. Multiple voice-driven initiatives, such as Apple’s Siri, have now reached commercial deployment. Bringing this technology into the real world raises a number of issues that ordinarily are not brought to the fore by the research practioner. Yet paying close attention to such aspects is critical to the success of the associated product. This paper discusses some of the attendant choices made in Siri, and speculates on their likely evolution going forward.

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