When Apple announced the iPhone 4S, it made a big deal of the built-in Siri voice interaction technology. I say 'interaction' rather than 'recognition' because using Siri really feels like you're interacting with the iPhone 4S in a meaningful way. For example, holding the iPhone 4S to your ear and saying "Tell Neil Berman I love gadgets too" will result in Siri composing a text message with the words "I love gadgets too" and addressing it to Neil Berman in your contacts list.
Pretty cool stuff, but not revolutionary you may say. After all, smartphones and even regular phones have had voice recognition technology for years. The difference is that you had to be so specific about your language, you had to be in a silent environment so the phone would hear you perfectly and you often felt just darn silly talking to your phone. With Siri I believe that will change. It's amazing how much natural language Siri understands. It's frankly incredible how well Siri works in noisy environments, and I mean not skipping a beat in the Durham Apple Store which is a cacophony of voices on a weekend. It remains to be seen whether it ever becomes cool to talk to your phone...but I see enough people doing it in the Apple Store to make me think this is going to catch on.
I have to think that there's some amazing technology at work in the microphones of the iPhone 4S. Siri's ability to work in noisy environments must be due in part to some amazing noise cancelling technology, which I expect goes beyond the capabilities of most other smartphones.
Coming back to the whether Siri really is the start of something amazing, I honestly believe this will be the time that many consumers recall as first experince of talking normally to a computer. The benefits to vision impaired consumers are also huge, just like the woman in the video demonstrates. I think we're going to see Siri work its way into more Apple products, and it certainly seems like a perfect fit for a future iteration of Apple TV. Maybe we'll finally be able to get rid of all those remote controls!
