“Apple Inc will again dominate conversations at CES, the world’s biggest technology showcase. Only this time, the talk is extending beyond iPad and iPhone chatter to include ‘Siri,’ the voice app that is capturing consumers’ imagination,” Poornima Gupta and Sinead Carew report for Reuters.
“Apple’s dulcet-voiced, speech-controlled personal assistant, a key factor in making the iPhone 4S a blockbuster, has breathed new life into the once-obscure and oft-maligned world of speech-recognition technology,” Gupta and Carew report. “Siri, which can do everything from taking dictation for text messages and entering calendar appointments to answering general-knowledge questions, has intrigued users. Experts say it demonstrated emphatically that voice recognition has moved beyond the days of misheard commands, narrowly defined keywords and anguishingly slow speeds.”
MacDailyNews Take: You know, like they have on Android.
Gupta and Carew report, “The smartphone industry is now scrambling to match and better Apple’s offering. Google Inc and Microsoft Corp will likely want to cash in on an explosion of interest in an area they have invested in for years, without getting anything like the attention Siri is attracting.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
Last sentence of the article: “CES has become the place where the expectations for the year are set in terms of the state of the art.”
…as defined by Apple.
Both Microsoft and Google already stated that they do not think something like Siri is needed. You now, you are supposed only talk to actual person via phone, not to some assistant with artificial intelligence — or something like that.
(But they lied, so, of course, they are working on their variants of Siri.)
Yeah, try getting someone from Google on the phone.
“The smartphone industry is now scrambling to match and better Apple’s offering.” …
They’ve been trying to do this since 2007 !!!
Apple said 5 years ago (in January 2007) that the iPhone was easily 5 years ahead of the competition… here we are 5 years later it it still is. But Apple didn’t rest… they kept raising the bar and Siri is easily years ahead of the competition. I don’t see this changing soon.
I worked with a Blackberry Playbook yesterday for a few hours to try and get video chat working for my friend. The size and build quality of the device is nice. I was satisfied with the smaller screen. The interface was fairly responsive and intuitive. But still no decent (non-BB) video chat. The device was lacking in support from developers. A big black eye for buyers.
How do Google and MS figure they can better a technology that’s been under development for forty years, with DARPA and SAAB scientists working on it?
I doubt if they plan to ‘better’ Siri technology. Their plan is to copy it, then get it on their phones as soon as possible.