Apple buys Siri voice-powered personal assistant
Apple’s buying spree obviously didn’t stop with chip wizards Intricity — they’ve snapped up voice-powered personal assistant Siri as well.
The Siri iPhone app is currently still available in the US App Store [free - iTunes link]. No guarantees on how long that will last. What makes Siri so interesting is how they integrate a number of API together (including OpenTable, TaxiMagic, MovieTikets.com, Rotten Tomatoes, WeatherBug, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Boss, StubHub, Bing, Eventful Freebase, Citysearch, AllMenus.com, Gayot, and Wolfram Alpha) and combine Nuance’s voice recognition technology with their own, DARPA-funded server backend. All this comes togeter to provide a way to easily input and process a number of highly useful requests. As Robert Scoble puts it, you can talk to it and have it do everything from get you a taxi buy you movie tickets.
Apple included VoiceControl for phone dialing, music playing, and general accessibility with iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0, but Google has raised the bar with ubiquitous OS integration starting with the Nexus One.
System-wide Siri might not just close that gap, but leapfrog it.
[FTC via Scobleizer and TechCrunch, thanks Fassy for the tip]
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