Here’s a fun topic I’d love to have in depth discussion on. 

Can Chatscript emulate all of Siri’s functionalities?  Assuming we use Nuance’s speech-to-text API and have access to Apple’s internal API to interface with other apps. 

What I have been wondering is ‘what’s the magic technology that Siri has’.  It looks like a well crafted chatbot technology that Chatscript can easily emulate.  From what I have read, Apple paid gazillion dollars to buy Siri and it’s years of DARPA funded research.  While the general people may think it is deep AI, but I am failing to see where the real technology advancement lies.

We do not see the “learning technology” that is claimed to underlie Siri which is where a bunch of money was spent.
And Siri is a bunch of OTHER apps on the server side to perform queries on specific websites, not just local phone app control.
So THAT functionality is not part of chatscript, though if you wrote it chatscript could call upon it.

It is clear that the chat part of siri and the ability to control other apps is certainly feasible with chatscript (and I would guess much better with chatscript). This will entertain you:
http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/features/being-human-how-real-can-artificial-intelligence-get_622599.html

Fun article!  Siri was designed to be functional so I assume it can not have too many human personality type patterns that may interfer with it’s main goal.  Yes, I don’t see how any automated learning algorithm can really help this type of helpdesk app.  For example, Google’s machine learning language translator is great at translating news articles but fails miserably at translating short chat messages (I tried).  So, I am still wondering what Apple got by purchasing Siri (aside from getting a very smart group of people and a great publicity stunt).

There is rarely any conflict between functionality and personality. You merely have to detect requests from general chat and you can prioritize functionality.

And part of what Apple bought was the “patterns” of what user requests mean. It takes a while to build up such a repetoire.

But I admit I don’t know “where all that money got”.

I agree with Francis. that was a fun article. If you were to judge that short conversation based on “functionality”, Siri would, of course, win, though I’m dismayed about it’s failing to call for an ambulance. If you judged that exchange on it’s conversational “value”, however, Rosette stomps Siri into the dirt.

Although not Chatscript related, we have been working on an Android app called Pandorabots CallMom which can replicate much of Siri’s actions (and more) using AIML:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pandorabots.callmom

CallMom looks quite interesting.  Is there anything you think that it does better than Siri, or that Siri does better?  I am not talking about specific phone features, but rather handling of natural language.  Just curious.

From Richard Wallace: “Unlike other VA apps, the A.I. for CallMom device control is an open source AIML project.  We can quickly and easily modify it to implement new ways of communicating with the app without having to change the app itself.  Ideas for new features might come from log file analysis, forums like this, or even Siri commercials. New changes are published almost immediately to the CallMom bots.”

We closely monitor chatlogs from users and can easily make amendments on the fly if someone suddenly discovers a new way of asking for the weather or suchlike. It also has the power and flexibility of AIML and so can learn things as you talk to it.

Anyway, I don’t wish to steer the thread towards AIML and there is a topic about it here:
http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewthread/882/

There is an example on that thread where Roger asks if we can include a “show me my photos” feature and within 5 minutes or so, I have coded one which is up and working without the user needing to update.

As far as i know, Siri is based on WolframAlpha. In that case it should not be so difficult to build a chatbot like Siri!

technically, WolframAlpha is merely one of several webservices used by Siri, which is based on technology developed at SRI

One should be able to license Nuance for TTS and WolframAlpha and, togather with Chatscript, build a cool Siri type app.  However, I think Nuance and WolframAlpha charge a hefty license fee for their API usage - not really for small startups.