Name: Siri
State: Stealth 

Siri looks to be an interesting potential competitor, primarily due to its angle on things. Firstly, it has 19 people with various impressive engineering pedigrees working on its product; secondly, it just raised $8.5m. However, this cloak-and-dagger stealth approach means nobody really knows what they’re up to. 

We can take a few guesses, though. They’re working on commercialisation activities related to CALO, a ‘personal cognitive assistant’ (think a pet robot that learns from your behaviour). TechCrunch takes this a little further by saying they’re aiming to give people who use the Internet ‘the luxury of thinking less on [their] own’. Hmmm.

It strikes me that this might well end up being something that attempts to solve the information-filtering problem I’ve talked about before, by putting together a complex model of the user’s preferences and activity, then using that to create a personalised window on the Internet. However, it could just as easily be something that figures out your most common online tasks and does them for you; maybe it can reply to form emails and leave feedback for your eBay customers without you lifting a finger! My money’s on something more like the former, though.

We won’t know more until next year, and although Siri’s reasons for secrecy are perfectly valid, surely keeping something aimed at the general Internet public under wraps for so long could cause problems — the end result might lose a lot of relevance if it’s not exposed to the world. If the technology behind it is as clever as it seems, and the implementation sound, they shouldn’t fear competitors stealing the idea; after all, the idea is only the beginning.