Siri

The book I read to research this post was Siri for Dummies by Marc Salzmann which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. On 5th of October last year which was the day before Steve Jobs died Apple had a press conference where they unveilled the iphone 4GS & many people were expecting the iphone 5 & the most exciting feature of that phone was for many people Siri. It's a voice activated assistant which is a download but can handle loads of different. Apple has teamed up with Wolfram Alpha so that you can ask it factual questions & it will give you an answer. You need to speak clearly & it doesn't cope very well with background noise. It adapts to the wording you use. A lot of the technology behind Siri comes from the DARPANET & the defence industry & the name comes from the SRI or Stanford Research Institute who were key developers. You can even ask it something profound like "What's the meaning of life?" & it will give you a witty answer. You can also tell it how you feel & it will offer advice. If you're looking for a certain type of shop in a particular town it will give you a list & tell you how far away they are. That feature also integrates with the GPS feature on the phone. Expect versions of Siri to come out for the iPad & iPod touch in the near future. Also although you can't directly put posts on twitter & facebook with Siri there's a way around it. You can download apps that let you do that.