Following is a guest post by Simon from www.mdoperations.co.uk.If you want to write guest posts for us do read our write for us page.

Keen Apple fans were anticipating something very like Siri with this release, getting their clue from Apple’s purchase of a voice-recognition software company (also called Siri; the personal assistant feature is named after the software developer) in April last year.

Siri started out by combining high-end AI research (derived partly from the company’s relationship with DARPA, the US defence agency responsible for research and development) with voice recognition software. The voice recognition part of Siri has a heritage dating all the way back to Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the hoary old PC speech recognition software: Siri partnered up with Nuance, current owners of Dragon. Anyone who used speech recognition software back in the 90s and 2000s will remember when you had to spend hours “training” the software, and even then had to deliberately speak slowly and clearly, and go back and correct the multiple errors in transcription later. Siri is a far cry from that, readily understanding a huge variety of accents and voices, without the need for training and without error.

Add in the AI part, and you have what makes her – yes, Siri has a female voice, when she replies to your queries – a genuine “Personal Assistant” rather than merely a piece of voice recognition software. Again, this is a far cry from earlier clunky attempts to get software to help you, like Microsoft Office’s much-hated paperclip. Earlier versions of Siri, previously available as an app that would run on the iPhone 4 or 3GS, already offered a convincing, integrated, personal assistant experience, listening to your request (“find me a sushi restaurant nearby”) and using other iPhone features to give you an answer that was relevant to your location, including letting you dial the restaurant directly from Siri. Siri is now, sadly, no longer available for those older phones – Apple very much want you to buy a 4S, if you want Siri!

The new, further improve iPhone 4S Siri really does deliver on its promise: ask it, or tell it, what you want, and it understands you and responds accordingly. It integrates dozens of other existing “partner” services, like Google, Bing, movie and restaurant review sites, movie and restaurant booking sites, etc., quite seamlessly. It’s not exactly difficult to navigate the web on an iPhone 4S using the touchscreen, and find the same info yourself, but Siri takes even that small amount of work out of the experience, as well as giving you the instant kudos of having “someone” else do the work for you.

As Mark Hirst, Managing Director of Best Mobile Contracts, puts it: “Apple’s introduction of the iPhone 4S with an A5 dual core processor, 8 megapixel camera and Siri voice recognition software, brings Apple up to speed with other smartphone handsets in the marketplace right now.” Of course, the 4S doesn’t just challenge other smartphones in technical specs. As ever with an iPhone, the big draw other than the name is that it all just plain works, right out of the box – you don’t have to be a technical expert to get the most out of your iPhone, whereas it would help to be a bit of a computer fan if you wanted to get the most out of an Android smartphone. Siri, despite nominally still being in beta, is a big part of that out-of-the-box functionality, making iPhone 4S contracts one of the most user-friendly, stress-free smartphone experiences out there.

Check out the following video for a demo.

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Tagged in: apple • iphone • iphone 4s • Siri

Written by Simon

Simon has written a total of 6 articles.