The iPhone
A pocket device appeared with a microphone, camera, sensors and a permanent connection.
Why it matters
A billion sensors in pockets created both the stream of data for training and the surface on which AI later reached people.
In this atlas it is an infrastructure record rather than a method. The consequences showed later: Google Voice Search launched on the iPhone in 2008, Siri became an app in 2010, and phone photographs filled computer vision datasets. Native third-party applications were announced by Apple only on 6 March 2008 (the SDK and the App Store, released in June); the 2007 announcement has none. The computation stayed in the cloud; the device supplied a microphone, a camera and a channel.