Long before today’s announcement that the Siri Voice Assistant would be an integral part of iOS, Siri was a third-party app. It wasn’t as pretty, and not nearly as well integrated, but it had one big advantage that it ran on just about any iOS device.Then Apple bought Siri. It immediately became clear that Apple was making a push into voice and yet, the app stayed on the store. It lived on un-updated, but it lived on nevertheless.
Siri brings a conversational interface to the iPhone which allows you to ask it to perform tasks for you such as find a French restaurant nearby and book a table, look up movie listings, order a taxi, or look up the phone number and address of a local business.Siri is the “mother of all mashups.” The iPhone app is a conversational interface with Siri’s servers on the Web, which tied into nearly 30 different APIs at launch, with more on the way. These include Open Table, TaxiMagic, MovieTikets.com, Rotten Tomatoes, WeatherBug, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Boss, StubHub, Bing, Citysearch, Gayot, and Wolfram Alpha.
This acquisition can mean two things: Apple will add Siri as a standard app on future iPhones and iPads or it is interested in the underlying natural language processing and semantic search technology to incorporate into its apps more broadly. It second option seems more likely.Siri understands what you say, the context and meaning around who and what you mention in your requests, and is capable of responding accordingly.But Siri is exclusive to the iPhone 4S, meaning you won’t get it with a simple iOS 5 upgrade.Download siri from the Iphone app store.
Siri Introduction Video:
This acquisition can mean two things: Apple will add Siri as a standard app on future iPhones and iPads or it is interested in the underlying natural language processing and semantic search technology to incorporate into its apps more broadly. It second option seems more likely.Siri understands what you say, the context and meaning around who and what you mention in your requests, and is capable of responding accordingly.But Siri is exclusive to the iPhone 4S, meaning you won’t get it with a simple iOS 5 upgrade.Download siri from the Iphone app store.
Siri Introduction Video: