Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator Video
rkarenaCited 3× on HN, 2015–2018
demo · general · evergreen · 2015–2018 on HN
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.
HN cites it as an early vision of voice assistants and software agents, often when comparing it with Siri and modern AI.
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3 comments from Hacker News
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.
Siri integration... getting closer. Another 30 years and we'll have the intelligent assistant. ▶ this video
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?