Talks to Watch

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator Video

217K views · Apr 8, 2007 · 5:48 · 0 HN recommenders · 3 mentions · discussed 2015–2018

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video imagines a conversational voice assistant, multi-touch tablet and video calling used by a professor. It was made years before the graphical web existed.

Why Hacker News points people here: HN cites it as an early vision of voice assistants and software agents, often when comparing it with Siri and modern AI.

“Here's an Apple video about conversational voice-based digital assistants... from 1987”HN comment, 2018

What Hacker News said 3

Cites itafrancisAug 2015

“Many moons ago, I remember seeing this video in a graduate computer science course on CHI and freaking out.”

Knowledge Navigator video as vision of future agents

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I don't know much about Zapier but IFTTT seems to me to be more like the infra-structure for software agents. IFTTT you are still creating recipes. I would like to say that Agent 2.0 would look like the Knowledge Navigator of the Apple videos ( this video ). Many moons ago, I remember seeing this video in a graduate computer science course on CHI and freaking out. Now the question is what does Agent 1.0 look like?

in “Ask HN: Do you think there will be full replacement to Facebook?” · view on HN
Cites itdoomlaserMay 2018

“Here's an Apple video about conversational voice-based digital assistants... from 1987”

Apple's 1987 vision of conversational voice assistants

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You can find plenty of articles in magazines in the early 1990s talking about the handheld internet connected device (that nobody could succeed with until the iPhone). The Mac itself was too early for wide adoption. The first Mac had a tiny memory footprint and no hard drive. CPU and GPU technology needed time to speed up and shrink in size and cost. Apple survived on Apple II sales for years after the Mac was introduced and iterated, and nearly suffocated from mismanagement until Jobs returned and the iMac launched — Windows 95 was right on time. Here's an Apple video about conversational voice-based digital assistants... from 1987 this video The Valley is littered with husks of companies that had the right vision before the technology was ready (e.g. link ). NeXT was almost one of them.

in “Steve Jobs at MIT Sloan School of Management (1992) [video]” · view on HN
JokecrussoJun 2016

“Siri integration... getting closer. Another 30 years and we'll have the intelligent assistant.”

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Siri integration... getting closer. Another 30 years and we'll have the intelligent assistant. this video

in “OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock” · view on HN