Siri
Many don’t seem to understand the sheer power of Siri one of Apple’s few recent iPhone feature announcements. If you don’t know or understand it. This voice driven personal assistant has the potential to redefine the very way we use our smartphones, tablets and eventually our computers. In one fell swoop it zooms past and ahead of all the attached and detached Qwerty keyboards and touchscreen virtual keypads. Something like this has been a long sought personal desire of mine ever since I suffered a debilitating stroke that impaired the use of my left side. For me this was truly catastrophic because I am a proud lefty and my overall productivity was affected to the point of keeping me from being able to continue working. In my recovery I have come to rely on Dragon Dictate to navigate my laptop and to input data into my MacBook, but in general my mobile capability has not caught up to my needs until now. For the fully-abled Siri may not be such a big deal, although it should be. For us differently-abled folk it most certainly is a big step towards wellness and into the future.
So while many complain about the iPhone 5 that didn’t come this week and the tragic loss of Steve Jobs, please let us stop and take a moment to congratulate the team at Apple on launching the innovation of Siri.
I do not really know who invented it or whose intellectual property or patent it is, but I feel that it absolutely can and will drastically change the mobile device landscape now and forever.
The gotcha may be that it will only be available initially on the iPhone 4S. That will seriously limit market adoption to only those that can affort an iPhone 4S and are in a position to go all-in.
It will be interesting to see exactly what plans Apple has for Siri’s future and how all the smartphone and tablet competitors will respond to this challenge. This might also be a good time to consider Nuance’s (Dragon) place in this emerging market.
Siri supports:
- Device Navigation via Voice commands
- Message entry and retrieval
- Dictation and general data entry
- Make calls
- Set reminders
- Perform complex context sensitive searches