TMCnet News
iPhone 4S makes talking to your mobile a reality [Cyprus Mail](Cyprus Mail Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Author: Alex Christoforou (@alexwadja) On January 9, 2007, from the Macworld conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made a big announcement. "An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator. An iPod, a phone, an Internet mobile communicator...these are NOT three separate devices!" he said. The iPhone was born and the entire mobile landscape has never been the same. All of sudden we moved from a point and click society to a touch and swipe world. The iPhone gave way to more iPhones, the iPad, the App store and Google's Android platform. Nokia, Blackberry and Windows were left scrambling for answers on how to compete (not with only Apple), but with the shift to touch device user interfaces. Keyboards on mobile phones began to look dated and silly. A new breed of mobile consumer was born, an individual that factors in apps, music and games when purchasing a new mobile handset. Voice quality runs a distant third or fourth in what matters nowadays. The iPhone's touch based interface gave way to a whole new, multi billion-dollar mobile development industry to take shape. It is estimated that mobile development alone employs over two million US workers, and who knows how many more around the world. Fast forward to October 5, 2011, where new CEO Tim Cook forgoes announcing a new iPhone 5, but instead gives us the iPhone 4S. The iPhone 4S has the same hardware (look and feel) as the iPhone 4 (Apple's best selling phone to date), but delivers a lot of extras under the hood, including faster processors, more storage space, new reminder and messaging apps and something called Siri, a voice activated personal assistant. My offices in Silicon Valley are located right down the street from a fairly large building that houses a company called Nuance. Everyday going to work I would pass this building wondering what the heck do they do to afford such a huge space. Well it turns out that Nuance Communications, among other things, focuses on speech recognition software that powers the iPhone app Siri, which Apple purchased a little less than one year ago. Siri is now baked right in to the iPhone 4S. While this may seem trivial in the showcase of awesome iPhone announcements, this may be the biggest innovation yet on mobile devices since the initial iPhone itself came out in 2007. Why you ask? Well think of it this way, Siri is voice interaction with your mobile phone, a personal assistant that uses natural language to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform various actions by delegating your requests to other apps on your phone like Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. Siri actually adapts to your preferences and can even personalize tasks such as making dinner reservations, giving you voice directions and calling a taxi. Now keep in mind that Apple was the first company to use a mouse in personal computing, introduce touch devices into our lives and now is moving forward into voice activated interfaces, with a service that really does understand what you say in a natural way. Siri recognizes your natural voice and then proceeds to take your spoken commands and turn them into actions such as sending emails, booking tickets, making meeting reminders and basically doing all the stuff you would dictate to a real life personal assistant (if you are lucky enough to have one). In much the same way that millions of apps where developed for touch based iPhones and iPads, in social, gaming and productivity, application developers are already looking at Siri and dreaming of ways that voice commands can change the way we interact with our mobile handsets and tablet computers. Think about how this will affect travel, search, and gaming. Imagine the possibilities for the vision impaired, being able to speak commands into their iPhone and have the phone actually perform all those tasks online or through their mobile provider. Voice interaction with computers has been stuff made for science fiction and yet today, 2011, we have a mobile phone that speaks to us, listens to us, and does things for us…WOW! Hot US companies like Foursquare and Quora have already started discussing how Siri will fundamentally change their mobile applications for the better. For Foursquare, the global leader in location-based check ins, Siri as a way to easily announce where you are. Just speak to Siri…"I am at Fridays restaurant in Nicosia" and then be delivered a special coupon right on your device. How about question and answer site Quora, having its users simply ask a question to Siri on their iPhone. Siri tell me using Quora: "What is the best way to handle a job interview?" and getting answers right back from Quora's database of user-generated answers. How easy will finding directions be once Google Maps syncs into the Siri engine, and how will this affect how we search for information on the Internet. Search will change forever because now we will simply pick up our iPhone and speak the words: "Siri find me the best big screen TVs for under €500" or "Siri find me all the Champions League matches scheduled for Tuesday." What could a natural language voice interface do for TV? Apple is said to be working on revolutionizing the TV set and changing the entire television industry, as it has done in computing, music and mobile. Will Siri voice commands power your new Apple iTV in 2013? Apple may not have announced the iPhone 5, but they may have just unleashed the next computing revolution. Voice based interfaces have arrived and this thing could be absolutely huge! Follow the cyprus mail on twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/cyprusmail Alex Christoforou is the CEO of Wadja, Inc. (www.wadja.com), a social media site focused on interest based networking, with offices in California, Greece and Cyprus. You can follow Alex on Twitter (@alexwadja) and read his wadja blog page at wadja.com/alex.blog. (c) 2011 Cyprus Mail Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |