“What would you like to hear?” – these were the first words ever spoken on TV by the Knight Industries Two Thousand, of KITT for short. 20 years ago. As a 9 year old, I was entralled and captivated by Knight Rider. It was my favourite tv programme. I would watch the adventures of Michael Knight and KITT religiously every week, recording each episode on my VHS, watching them over and over again. That’s how I didn’t even have to look up KITT’s first words ever uttered, they are ingrained in my brain! If you’re interested, Michael’s response was “What the hell was that?” for which I was admonished at primary school. Why? Because I wrote a story using those very same words, and apparently you shouldn’t use the word “hell” in that context  in a Catholic primary school!

I loved Knight Rider so much I even wanted my parents to buy an Austin Maestro (at least I think that was the make) that spoke to you – well, when I say it spoke to you, it would say “Please put on your seatbelt” when you hadn’t, but I didn’t care – that was close enough to KITT. Naturally, my parents had no intention of buying a car on these grounds.

There were quite a lot of “technology developments “seen on TV during the 80’s I was hoping were true. In a similar vein, there was RALPH, the talking computer from “The Whizz Kids”. The Black And Decker hydrator from Back To The Future 2, that was voice controlled and took a tiny dehydrated pizza and in seconds turned it into a full size margherita!

At the time it seemed that it wouldn’t be long before these things became mainstream. Voice recognition technology has been around for quite a few years – I remember buying some software about 10 years ago that was supposed to allow the user to simply dictate to it and it would convert your words to text. The problem was that it was crap.

I’m quite a fan of Apple – I have loads of their gizmos, computers and devices, but it was only last week that I bought an iPhone for the first time.  And therefore the first time I had the opportunity to use Siri, the voice activated assistant. Even then, I had the phone for a week before I decided to play around with this. I had heard and read lots about Siri, but I must admit to being blown away by this capability!

Not only could I say things like “Ring home” and it would (nothing new here, but at least it worked) – but I could ask it questions, it would understand and interpret my questions correctly (most of the time), and it would give me answers. Of course, you’d get the odd error like in response to my question “What’s the weather like in Sutera, Sicily?” it answered “You want to know the weather in Burkina Faso?”, but hey, no one has ever used the words Burkina Faso in a conversation with me, so that’s a new experience!

The potential of this technology is enormous – it takes us towards genuine interaction with computers. I can’t think of a single technology development over the last few years that is as much of a breakthrough as this. Anyone will be able to interact with computers, or at least computer-enabled services without being at all IT literate.

So it’s taken 20 years, going beyond the year two thousand, to come into contact with a computing capability that actually resembles in some way the Knight Industries Two Thousand. That’s what Siri sort of reminded me of, KITT.  I asked it this morning “I would like to listen to some music” in the hope it would say “What would you like to hear?”. Alas no. It just said “Playing all songs” and starting playing songs from my iTunes collection. Not quite what I was after, but it’s a decent enough start.  Maybe now someone will actually invent a time machine in a De Lorean…