Meet Siri, the Intelligent Assistant on your new iPhone 4S.  Apple makes the next step towards sci-fi dream computers by releasing Intelligent Assistant on the iPhone 4S. Intelligent Assistant is an application short of the HAL 9000 but on par with Joshua in the War Games. The concept is to create a voice-activated interface that can do more than just data entry. To accomplish this, Intelligent Assistant syncs with everything. In plain language, you can tell the program to check your stock portfolio, text message your friends, or look up the top Yelp results for Vietnamese food near your current GPS location. Apple engineers are also saying that the Intelligent Assistant is able to learn your voice, solving numerous problems around dialects and variations in speech patterns.

 

 

Rumors around this development came with Apple’s acquisition of Siri, which was, prior to this announcement, just an iPhone app that took off. Voice recognition software has come a long way in recognizing different voices and decoding the complexities of syntax since then, though. Apple’s desire for this technology goes back to the eighties with former CEO John Scully’s book, “Odyssey,” where he dreamed up a tablet computer capable of voice recognition.  The concept has long been on the imagination of engineers – Disney even featured a (often glitchy) prototype of an interactive talking computer back in the nineties.

Intelligent Assistant: iPhone 4S

Norman Winarsky, the cofounder of Siri, is expecting Apple’s release of this technology to be “world changing.”  One downside is that Apple is releasing Intelligent Assistant exclusively on the iPhone 4S.  Don’t despair, if the tech market follows Apple’s lead like they did for iPhone and tablets, voice recognition software will soon be available everywhere.

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Matthew Sommer writes tech tips for business and helps people to get cheap business insurance.

Further Reading:  iPhone 4S – What’s New and Why You Should Be Happy