Siri Makes Your iPhone Your Secretary

[Paul Daniel Ash]

Speech recognition on the iPhone is nothing new. I use reQall when my ADD-addled brain momentarily flashes on something so that I can remember it later. Jott works well for notes; I've even written blog entries with it, and though voice-activated GPS sounds cool, I'm not so interested that I want to pay for it. Now, though, a Silicon Valley startup has come up with the brilliant idea of melding voice recognition with artificial intelligence. The result is Siri, and it's only available on the iPhone... for now, anyway.

Siri has the best user interface possible: your voice. Ask the app a question and it will search the web for your answer. Say "where can I see live music in Boston tonight" and it will go onto StubHub and tell you who's playing near you, with single-tap calling and Maps links. Ask about the movies and it gives you a theatres and showtimes from MovieTickets. tell it you want a cab and it sends your GPS coordinates to TaxiMagic. Over time, it will learn what you like, refining its searches to match your interests.

According to the New York Times, Siri is a for-profit spinoff of SRI, the non-profit Stanford Research Institute. SRI got a big chunk of a five-year grant from DARPA - the US government advanced research agency - to develop a "personal cognitive assistant." SRI's project is called CALO, or Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes, and this product is one of the first results of that research.

Speech recognition quality is very good: Siri licensed technology from Nuance, which provides the speech-to-text engine for both Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search. The app is supposed to run only on iPhone 3GSes, and that's understandable: it's pretty painfully slow on a jailbroken 3G. Siri says it will be coming out with an optimized version for older phones and iPod touches later this year. Android and BlackBerry versions are also in the works.

The company gets a small fee from any purchases you make with Siri, so the app itself is free. At the present time, though, it only offers services in the United States.

[brianlg]

Seems pretty cool I gotta check this out

[rickybobby]

im gonna check this out and report back later

[one1]

Only useful in the city. IMO.

[moribo]

This looks awesome!

[Melech518]

Going to have to see how well this one works for myself

[confucious]

Siri has the best user interface possible: your voice.

Shouldn't that read the worst UI possible? Not something that interests me at all.

[lolcats1]

dude this is ******* legit

[confucious]

Deleted for reasons of stupidity.

[rickybobby]

This is one of the slowest apps i have ever seen please dont get this its laggy and slow to respond and it didnt even find what i was looking for i said FIND ME A GYM it gave me ATM speech recognition is ok but overall 1-10 5

[brianlg]

Getting unsuspecting users to ruin their phones testing a piece of junk is not what I'd call legit.

How does this ruin your phone

[lolcats1]

Getting unsuspecting users to ruin their phones testing a piece of junk is not what I'd call legit.

because this was really just a virus that rendered your phone inoperable? my my, that's quite nasty.

[zinjen]

this application makes me want to take my pants off and do the helicopter in front of my monitor.

[Happy Noodle Boy]

This app is pretty awesome. Almost too awesome.

[StealthBravo]

It works really well. I have been using it all afternoon. "Make me a sandwich"

[pixelflash]

this application makes me want to take my pants off and do the helicopter in front of my monitor.

Dude, you'll do good in a circus.

[DMT]

hmmm ill have to see with this is about...

[lolcats1]

dude o dude just found this ridiculous band. turns out that vegetarians can do deathgrind. lol



or does that make is veg-grind?

hmmmm

[Jgamble317]

lol it does run slow on my 2g, but it runs great on my girl's 3gs

[politicalslug]

I will just say this: This app has earned a place on my iPhone's homepage. That's one of 21 (5 icon dock) and I have over 200 apps on my phone (thank you categories) and thousands in iTunes (thank you... well you get the idea). Needless to say I've moved the Google mobile app to page two and this is now taking its place.