Kevin Surace's team at General Magic built a virtual assistant called Mary in the 1990s, years before Siri existed. They designed it to cost under $100 a month and feel human-like. The technology later became OnStar, Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa.
This man's invention is in your pocket right now, but you've probably never heard of him until today. When we built the first virtual assistants back in the mid to late '90s at a company called General Magic, it was very, very hard because we didn't have the AI and the ML that we have today. We didn't have the voice recognition technology as good as it is today. We didn't have text-to-speech as good as it is today. But the vision was true to today. And that vision is that we want assistance at work, at home, whatever. However, of course, we really— most of us can't afford to have, you know, people just tagging along and taking care of everything that we want. So the whole idea was you should have a personal assistant and it should cost you, you know, under $100 a month rather than thousands of dollars a month, right? But that has to be very, very human-like, very human interaction. And the more human-like that interaction is, the more we found people would interact with, in our case, her. Her name was Mary. We did find that the usage was amazing, and that technology ultimately went on to power General Motors' OnStar system, their virtual advisor. And the underlying technology got licensed by Apple for Siri and Google for the Google Assistant and Amazon Amazon for Alexa.
