Woz talks artificial intelligence at San Francisco event

Jun 9, 2016 12:49 GMT  ·  By

Everyone would be tempted to believe that the iPhone is Apple’s top product, but if you’re asking Steve Wozniak, who, among others, cofounded the company with Steve Jobs nearly 40 years ago, there’s something even more important that Cupertino has in its portfolio right now: the App Store.

Speaking at the Salesforce TrailheaDX conference in San Francisco, Woz explained that the App Store has apps that can change people’s lives, and although users aren’t downloading as many application as before, there’s still a future in this business, and this is why developers keep investing in it.

"The most important apps, what would I have done without them?" he is quoted as saying. "The ones that take me furthest in life are made by third parties."

AI investments

And one possible way to give apps a future is to invest in artificial intelligence and virtual reality, with Wozniak explaining that Siri is one big step in this direction.

And yet, Woz still doesn’t think that Siri is in the right place, pointing out that sometimes it has problems even understanding his voice.

“Sometimes Siri doesn't get the words right, and I'm pissed. It's not like a perfect human yet, but I want to get there. It's a friend, our best friend, we fall in love with it,” he explains.

Many people are worried that investing in artificial intelligence and machines could put more jobs at risk, but Wozniak believes that robots won’t impact our lives in such a dramatic way. In fact, machines will be there to help us, not to hurt us.

“They're going to be helping us with tasks in our lives for a long, long time, improve our feelings about being humans. I just love this machine [a smartphone] I couldn't live without...That's what little personal computers were supposed to be about even in the beginning,” he adds.

If you’re asking Bill Gates, robots will be here with more advanced capabilities. Microsoft’s co-founder recently said that machines would have “vision and manipulation as good as humans” and estimated that this would happen in the next decade. He, however, predicted important advances in a number of fields, including health, where robots should help address a wide array of challenges.