We're on the Brink of a Revolution in Crazy-Smart Digital Assistants

Here's a quick story you've probably heard before, followed by one you probably haven't. In 1979 a young Steve Jobs paid a visit to Xerox PARC, the legendary R&D lab in Palo Alto, California, and witnessed a demonstration of something now called the graphical user interface. An engineer from PARC used a prototype mouse to navigate a computer screen studded with icons, drop-down menus, and "windows" that overlapped each other like sheets of paper on a desktop. It was unlike anything Jobs had seen before, and he was beside himself. "Within 10 minutes," he would later say, "it was so obvious that every computer would work this way someday." As legend has it, Jobs raced back to Apple and commanded a team to set about replicating and improving on what he had just seen at PARC. And with that, personal computing sprinted off in the direction it has been traveling for the past 40 years, from the first Macintosh all the way up to the iPhone.