Siri is the voice assistant introduced with the iPhone 4S designed to make the user’s life easier. It is an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator which works as an application for Apple's iOS.
The application uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of web services. Through natural commands spoken into the phone, Siri jumps to provide assistance or information as required by the request.
Siri is a name, but the public sometimes describe its (her) name as a Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, originally introduced as an iOS application available in the App Store by Siri Inc. Siri Inc. was acquired by Apple on April 27, 2010.
Siri that is a spin-out from the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center, and is an offshoot of the DARPA-funded CALO project, focuses on a Conversational Interface, Personal Context Awareness, and Service Delegation. The original American voice was provided by Susan Bennett in July 2005.
The original Siri application relied upon a number of partners, including:
- OpenTable, Gayot, CitySearch, BooRah, Yelp, Yahoo Local, ReserveTravel, Localeze for restaurant and business questions and actions.
- Eventful, StubHub, and LiveKick for events and concert information.
- MovieTickets, Rotten Tomatoes, and the New York Times for movie information and reviews.
- Bing Answers, Wolfram Alpha and Evi for factual question answering.
- Bing, Yahoo, and Google for web search.
On October 4, 2011, Apple introduced the iPhone 4S with their implementation of Siri. The new version of Siri is integrated into iOS, and offers conversational interaction with many applications, including reminders, weather, stocks, messaging, email, calendar, contacts, notes, music, clocks, web browser, Wolfram Alpha, and maps.
With Siri at the core of iOS, Apple removed the existing Siri app from the App Store, and closed the door for any other non-Apple platform to use it.
Currently, Siri now supports: English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese. Siri has limited functionality outside the US. It also supports search from Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia. Siri also works with Google Maps and Yelp! search, and works with limited functionality outside the U.S..
Siri was met with a very positive reaction for its ease of use and practicality, as well as its apparent "personality". Google’s executive chairman and former chief, Eric Schmidt, has conceded that Siri could pose a threat to the company’s core search business. Google generates a large portion of its revenue from clickable ad links returned in the context of searches. The threat comes from the fact that Siri is a non-visual medium, therefore not affording users with the opportunity to be exposed to the clickable ad links.
Conclusion
Although voice recognition has made its debut years ago, Siri has proven to be well beyond expectations. And there is always a probability where speech recognition can be a lot more than it is intended. In rare moments of greatness, when a person or company does a job well enough, the result is a change in expectations.
Consumers become accustomed to a heightened level of service. They expect it normally. When heightened expectations are briefly unmet, users sometimes lash out in disillusionment, forgetting how far along things have come. People may suffer through reading an imperfect entry on the internet and ask why the it can't do and help any better, forgetting that the it has made incredible improvements on the nature of free information.
Expectations for voice recognition have been low for several years. People had underwhelming experiences with voice recognition on their smartphones and GPS devices. This formed a set of expectations that self-reinforced what people built. If developers and innovators don't see technology moving toward voice recognition, they are not going to try to push it to move in that direction. But with momentum building, they're going to hop on board; and expectations create reality.
There is a new era of expectations for voice recognition, and a new reality is soon to follow. Although with privacy controversies, Siri has already proven to represent a step forward in voice recognition. Whereas first-generation implementations were largely superficial, Siri offers fundamental improvements on the way people navigate their mobile lifestyle.
Siri is far from perfect, but as people use it more, they are getting better at figuring out what type of natural language commands work best. Siri isn’t able to do everything, nor to understand some requests, but the technology is impressive in how often it works as intended. Siri is still young with many flaws. A lawsuit had marked the shifting expectation that voice recognition should be perfect. Some may think it was just one man's opinion, but as the media make a big deal about it, and understand that the lawsuit punctuates the early realization of a fantasy.