Siri For iPhone: Your Assistant-On-A-Phone

Siri is an iPhone App and it is free. But unlike the many free apps on the App Store, it has the collective forces of DARPA and Stanford U (AKA Super Geek central where the Valley shops for talent). This is an app that acts like your personal assistant and all you have to do is speak to it. Yes, it actually recognizes what you say and executes accordingly. But it is nothing like those spoken shortcuts and Google voice input. This once actually understands what you are saying and doesn’t just match keywords and follow a template. Welcome to future, dear reader.

Siri is an app that understands what you are asking for and does accordingly. Say if you want to go the closest burger joint or want to find a chinese takeout, all you have to do is tell it to “find the closest Chinese take out”. Upon hearing you say this, it will parse your sentence, fetch your location data and go hunting. It will then return with relevant data and display it.

But it can do more than just searches. If you tell it “book me 2 tickets for Avatar at the closest movie theatre” it will do it for you. Siri has a tie up with several services like Stubhub and other online booking/reservation/ordering services. So it will necessarily replace the dozens of one service apps that you have with just one, intelligent app. If the place you are looking for cannot be booked through Siri’s service, it will fetch all the data it can to help you with the booking. That includes address, phone number and a map to the place. Thank goodness for commercial GPS on a chip systems.

You can also ask it to remind you about certain things. It will email you at the right time to remind you about it. You ask it to call you a cab, tell you about the latest movies (funny, romantic, etc.), music, concerts, weather forecast and all that. Now if only it could hold all your calls. I guess there’s an(other) app for that!

The speech recognition engine comes from Nuance – the same people who do Dragon Speaking Naturally and power the Ford Sync speech recognition engine. The A.I. behind it is the CALO project at Standford U funded by the government (guess which department). CALO stands for Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes.

The company makes money by getting a commission from the bookings/transactions made through Siri an the customer pays nothing for the brilliant service. If you have an iPhone 3GS, try this out right now!

Related posts: