A New Personal Assistant Comes to the iPhone

Previously Google’s mobile application had the best service for voice recognition and search capability. That is no longer the case with the introduction of Siri. A virtual personal assistant has been born and they should be hired after the first interview. A quote from Siri’s website offers some interesting information on the birth of this app.

“Siri was born out of SRI’s CALO Project, the largest Artificial Intelligence project in U.S. history. (CALO stands for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). Made possible by a $150 million DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) investment, the CALO Project included 25 research organizations and institutions and spanned 5 years. Siri is bringing the benefits of this technology to the public in the first mainstream consumer application of a virtual personal assistant.”

Powered by Nuance’s voice recognition software, this free application is legit. Despite the fact that Siri is optimized for the iPhone 3GS, it was impressive on my jailbroken 3G. A few days ago, I was looking for the nearest soccer store to my home. I opened up Siri and asked where the nearest soccer store was. Within 20 seconds, I had a list of six different stores with 4.2 miles of my location. One “tap” further and I can call the store, see reviews via Yahoo Local, send the info about the store to a friend, or get the navigation results as well.  Very cool.

Within Siri you can make purchases for movie tickets or a laundry list of various items as well as make reservations at a restaurant (the first service they use is Opentable). The app has the option for you to store a credit card which will facilitate the purchase of anything within the app. It seems like there is nothing this app won’t search for. Whether it be random sports facts, flight details or practically any information available via a web search, Siri will try to find the answer for you. I did try to do a search for “the winner of Super Bowl 44″ about two hours after the game, and Siri could not find an answer for me but did point me towards the nfl.com website.

If Siri has trouble transcribing what you are saying through the voice app, you can just tap the text bubble that pops up and edit the text or you can repeat your question again. A quick search for ‘when Alicia Keys would be performing in Los Angeles’ for her next concert had this response:

Note that you can purchase tickets right here (through StubHub) and look at exactly where your seats would be as well. This is a very exciting app which I expect to continue to improve as further updates are released. This will be one of my heaviest used apps starting today. Take a look at this video that shows Siri in action. Please share your thoughts in the comments section.