Apple buys Siri voice-powered personal assistant
Apple's buying spree obviously didn't stop with chip wizards Intricity -- they've snapped up voice-powered personal assistant Siri as well.
The Siri iPhone app is currently still available in the US App Store [free - iTunes link]. No guarantees on how long that will last. What makes Siri so interesting is how they integrate a number of API together (including OpenTable, TaxiMagic, MovieTikets.com, Rotten Tomatoes, WeatherBug, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Boss, StubHub, Bing, Eventful Freebase, Citysearch, AllMenus.com, Gayot, and Wolfram Alpha) and combine Nuance's voice recognition technology with their own, DARPA-funded server backend. All this comes togeter to provide a way to easily input and process a number of highly useful requests. As Robert Scoble puts it, you can talk to it and have it do everything from get you a taxi buy you movie tickets.
Apple included VoiceControl for phone dialing, music playing, and general accessibility with iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0, but Google has raised the bar with ubiquitous OS integration starting with the Nexus One.
System-wide Siri might not just close that gap, but leapfrog it.
[FTC via Scobleizer and TechCrunch, thanks Fassy for the tip]
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler. Follow him on Twitter @reneritchie
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So control the whole phone by voice ?
Go on Google, keep telling us iPhone users what apps we won't get from you. Make our day.
I saw this article on MDN, so I decided download it. Wow! What a nice application. It recognized everything I said on the first attempt. It makes additional suggestions for you can provide weather for the day of an event you asked for and a slew of other things.
Can't wait to see what Apple will do with this technology. Like the person above me said "control the whole phone with your voice would be nice"
I emailed them about 6 months ago requesting them to fix something as simple as finding directions to disneyland from my house. It still doesn't work. I ask it "directions to Disneyland" it goes dumb on me.
Apple is a baller
GREAT app! Just installed it. Good job Apple. Best voice recognition I've ever used.
Funny app I installed it a couple days ago and was messing around with it. And spoke into the mic. And said I need some tits. And the phone said "ok I looked for strip clubs a few miles from you home. Haha funny stuff.