Next-Gen Siri Uses Power of Conversation to Teach Kids to Code

In a new iPad game, a smarter Siri will help talk kids through coding puzzles, but with a key improvement over the iPhone incarnation: the power of conversation.
Kuato Screenshot
In a new iPad game, a smarter Siri will help talk kids through coding puzzles, but with a key improvement over the iPhone incarnation: the power of conversation.Screenshot: Kuato Studios

Your ship crash-lands on an alien world. To get out alive, you need to hack your way through the wreckage � not with an axe, but with algorithms. Your skills are a little rusty, so you turn to the shiny round drone hovering over your shoulder: "Siri, what's a boolean operator?"

Welcome the world of Kuato Studios, a London-based startup developing a third-person-shooter-style game designed to teach kids how to code. Company founder Frank Meehan pulled together a team of developers from Rockstar, Konami and other top-shelf gaming companies earlier this year to build what he sees as an antidote to too much boring educational software. An early prototype resembles EA's sci-fi adventure Mass Effect; Meehan hopes that Kuato's as-yet-unnamed iPad-based game will engage kids by looking and feeling as much as possible like the games they play for fun. But the game comes with a secret weapon those other games don't have � Siri's heir apparent.

Meehan, who's also sheperded smartphone handsets to market, sat on the board of Siri Inc., the company spun out of a project at the famed SRI International research institute and later purchased by Apple. Since then, Siri has become the world's best-known "virtual personal assistant," a slightly hard-of-hearing digital concierge that can answer simple spoken questions and follow basic verbal commands on the iPhone. As Siri was being brought to market, its inventors at SRI were already hard at work on the next step in Siri's evolution. In Kuato's game, it's this smarter Siri who will help talk kids through coding puzzles, but with a key improvement over the iPhone incarnation: the power of conversation.

As Meehan describes it, the current version of Siri isn't especially thoughtful. Specifically, Siri doesn't remember anything you've said. Every exchange is like meeting Siri for the first time. If you first ask Siri "What's the weather in San Francisco?," to find out next what the skies look like in the British capital you need to ask "What's the weather in London?" Using the next generation of Siri, which Kuato is licensing from financial backer SRI, the conversation goes more like this:

You: What's the weather in San Francisco?

Next-gen Siri: Foggy. Misty. Wear a jacket. It's July.

You: And what about London?

Next-gen Siri: Raining, natch. Wear your wellies.

Okay, so even next-gen Siri isn't quite that snarky. But notice the subtle change in the form the second question takes. Next-gen Siri remembers. It's context-aware. Call-and-response has evolved into dialogue.

Spanish bank BBVA has already started testing the chattier version of Siri as part of a pilot program with SRI nicknamed Lola. The bank's customers will interact with Lola like they would with a bank teller, if the technology works as promised. In Kuato's game, set to come out later this year, the Lola-like chat-drone will serve as an always-available teacher. with an expert knowledge of XML and JavaScript, the two languages the game will initially teach. To progress in the game, players must solve coding problems in between bouts with bad guys. If they get stuck, they can just ask and keep asking until they figure it out, Meehan says: "You're actually able to work down to the problem that the kid is trying to get at."

Instead of standard coding exercises, Kuato's game lets players use their growing skills to build new life forms and share them on Facebook.

Screenshot: Kuato Studios

In its current version, Meehan says the next-gen Siri can only act as a good conversationalist if she stays focused. In other words, a meaningful dialogue can only happen within a narrow field of knowledge. Kuato's virtual assistant can talk about code but won't have good restaurant recommendations or insight into the fall of Rome. Much like the current Siri will default to a web search when it doesn't know what you're talking about, the next version can't hold a conversation about just anything.

"This isn't HAL," Meehan says. Still, he believes a HAL-like "open context" digital companion that can converse with you the way a human friend would will become a reality in about 20 or 30 years. "This is a first little part of that. And I stress it's a little part," Meehan says of Kuato's chatty, code-savvy helper. "But it's a step forward."