Scott Forstall on the Future of Siri and AI (2017) [video]

The exchange at 47:48 has been coming to mind more and more of late.

"Where do you see the future of Siri and other AI going?"

There's a lot of, I mean..."Siri and other AI," there's Siri, there's the..."Can you ask something a question?" Like, when we were doing Siri, I was blown away by it—having had my Master's in artificial intelligence—so when I saw Siri I thought, "Wait, this is supposed to be 20 years from now, I can't believe it's now." And I kind of thought, you know, Google is...if you go to a library and you look up in the card catalog, "What reference materials do you have related to this," and then you go and look at every one and figure out who's right. Siri is, you ask a reference librarian: "Go find the answer to this question." I think that sort of thing is very very interesting, and the more we can do to have that...now, if you look at AI, I think there's a lot we can do with AI that we're not doing right now that I hope we get to. I can talk about it if you want...?

"Let's go on."