Siri

What could be more exciting than controlling your in-home lighting from your iPad? Yep, you guessed it, controlling you in-home lighting with your voice through the use of Siri. That is now a possibility thanks to developer Brandon Evans who has worked out a way to control the recently launched smart lighting system from Philips.

Apple is currently looking for a few good people fluent in Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Korean, Norwegian, and Swedish to join the Siri team. Now, Siri is not compatible with a few of the languages on that list, including Swedish, Finnish, and Arabic, so it could well be that this is a sign of language support to come.

With Siri, you can shop for anything Apple right from your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or iPad mini. Get product info, pricing, and more with the Apple Store app, the press of a button, and the sound of your voice.

It's been over a year now since Siri launched alongside the iPhone 4S in October of 2011. When I first saw Siri, it seemed to have enormous potential as: 1) A natural language interface that may one day do to multitouch and graphics was they did to the command line; 2) thanks to that interface, a way for Apple to intermediate and broker search away from Google and towards parter content; and 3) by virtue of that intermediation and brokerage, a gateway into customer insight analytics.

On the client side, I've enjoyed the type of results Siri delivers enough, both in terms of content and presentation, to wish Apple would: 1) hook it into Spotlight so I could still use it when talking would be impossible or inappropriate, or the natural language parser wasn't available; and 2) fix it so the natural language parser wasn't so frequently unavailable. (Purple-dot-purple-dot-purple-dot-nothing is the mouse only randomly getting food.)

Since then, Apple has brokered deals for sports, restaurant, and movie knowledge bases in Siri, including the ability to start table reservations and, soon, movie ticket purchases right from within the service. However, also since then, Google has launched their competing Google Now service. And Google knows services the way Apple knows hardware and software. It offers on-device voice parsing, Google's industry-leading backend infrastructure, and goes a step beyond Siri by attempting to predictively provide information and answer questions before you even ask them.

Now, Apple has started hiring people away from Amazon to help with the service and, in the wake of a management re-ogranization, Siri has been given to Apple's "fixer", senior vice-president Eddy Cue to help set, or reset, its course going forward.

Because Siri is only as useful as its weakest server and slowest response, and both those things are going to need some serious attention.

Eddie Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, is now really, truly in change of everything data and ecommerce driven at Apple, thanks to the recent management shakeups. That includes Siri and iOS 6 Maps, both of which have received negative feedback during their respective launches. And that's in addition to his continuing role as head of the iTunes, iCloud, and App Stores.

With iOS 6, your personal virtual assistant, Siri can now help you find restaurants and even book tables. You will need the OpenTable app from the App Store to complete your reservations, but Siri do a lot of the heavy lifting, including finding places and times, and showing you Yelp-powered reviews and pictures.