In a Newsweek interview Steve Jobs made in 1984 he talked about something exactly like what Apple now introduce with Siri for the iPhone 4S.
I’ve always thought it would be really wonderful to have a little box, a sort of slate that you could carry along with you. You’d get one of these things maybe when you were 10 years old, and somehow you’d turn it on and it would say, you know, “Where am I?” And you’d somehow tell it you were in California and it would say, “Oh, who are you?”
“My name’s Steven.”
“Really? How old are you?”
“I’m 10.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Well, we’re in recess and we have to go back to class.”
“What’s class?”
You’d start to teach it about yourself. And it would just keep storing all this information about you and maybe it would recognize that every Friday afternoon you like to do something special, and maybe you’d like it to help you with this routine. So about the third time it asks you: “Well, would you like me to do this for you every Friday?” You say, “Yes,” and before long it becomes an incredibly powerful helper. It goes with you everywhere you go. It knows most of the raw information in your life that you’d like to keep, but then starts to make connections between things, and one day when you’re 18 and you’ve just split up with your girlfriend it says: “You know, Steve, the same thing has happened three times in a row.”
(Source: Newsweek)
So, it’s amazingly similar to Siri, but a bit more advanced at this point.
