[VIDEO] In 1987 Apple predicted it would launch Siri in 2011

This is very, very good.

This video created by Apple in 1987 shows how a ‘Knowledge Navigator’ would work, depicting a university professor interacting with a tablet computer through voice. The system’s animated avatar summarizes emails, responds to voice commands, extracts and displays data, provides intelligent information retrieval, and provides message filtering.

This video was posted on Waxy, where they calculate the date of the video as September 16, 2011, based on the calendar on the desk, and the request for a five-year old research paper from 2006.

Siri, launched along with the iPhone4S last week, is designed to have similar capabilities, suggesting that the 24-year-old video predicted the future accurately to within one month.

Unfortunately Siri, and generally artificial intelligence of today, is not capable of many of the feats performed by the technology in the video. However we are not that far off. There may have been a bit of over-reach in predicting where this technology would take us. Because the underlying trends in information technology are fairly well known, it just requires imagination (and sometimes some brakes on our imagination) to anticipate what will actually come to pass. This is a great example.