“Apple’s legendary co-founder Steve Jobs has a posthumous hit on his hands with the launch of the iPhone 4S, which was unveiled one day before his death on Oct. 5,” Andy Goldberg writes for Deutsche Presse-Agentur. “[Steve Jobs] bet that one single innovation in the Apple 4S would be enough to silence detractors, establish the new phone as another must-have device and perhaps forge itself as Apple’s secret weapon in its death-battle with Google.”
“That weapon goes by the name of Siri: Apple’s new combo of voice recognition and artificial intelligence that is the closest that humankind has yet seen to the kind of digital servants long portrayed in Hollywood fantasies, like the computer HAL in the classic ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,'” Goldberg writes. “Like HAL, Siri is both smart and sassy. In the U.S. it is female, in Britain it is male.”
MacDailyNews Take: Siri is a she. She should have a female voice everywhere.
Goldberg eports, “”Tim Bajarin, the doyen of technology analysts, believes that the all-knowing digital assistant is also a Trojan horse, linking its users to huge databases that will allow Apple to circumvent the search engines of rivals like Google and Microsoft’s Bing to bring information to its customers. He likens the introduction of Siri to Jobs’ championing of the mouse and the touch screen — two watershed moments in the history of computing. ‘Jobs and the Apple team have given something to the world that it will look back on and regard as the next major user input technology: voice and speech. But we will also realize that the real breakthrough is in Siri’s applied artificial intelligence (AI),’ Bajarin commented. ‘Use of voice coupled with AI on a consumer product like the iPhone is going to change the way consumers think about man-machine interfaces in the future.'”
“Analysts are already speculating when Siri will be integrated into other Apple products,” Goldberg reports. “They are salivating at the prospect of a Siri-enabled Apple TV, a device that some believe could hit the market next year and grow to become even bigger than Apple’s iPhone success in a $100 billion per year sector.”
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