Call it your own personal virtual assistant, but Siri Inc. has developed an Apple iPhone application that claims to use AI (artificial intelligence) like characteristics to fulfill your personal requests. The software application works through voice activation. You only need to speak your request into the iPhone and the personal assistant will scour the necessary information for you.
Where this application differs from one of the large search engines is Siri consolidates data from a number of different services that would otherwise require the use of several different applications. Some of the data partners with which Siri is involved include Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, CitySearch, OpenTable, MovieTickets and StubHub.
Siri can offer an iPhone user information on movie start times, local city weather, restaurants, dry cleaners or locations of ATM machines. Users can even ask something like where can I get a haircut and Siri will offer up barber shops that are in walking distance of the user.
Because Siri is said to include cognitive software and advanced speech recognition, the application is said to get smarter over time returning more targeted results that are more in line with the users personal preferences, hence the AI angle.
Currently, this “Do Engine” is available as an iPhone application, but Chief Executive Dag Kittlaus has indicated that plans are in the works to also port the application to Android powered smartphones and the RIM Blackberry.
If you are interested in the application, it is available as a free download that has been optimized for the iPhone 3GS but seems to work fine on the iPhone 3G as well. OS 3.1 is the minimum operating system for this application.
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thanks for the update – the app looks very interesting, but i question voice control accuracy. I will try it though.